[openbiblio-dev] What to do with the MARC data?

Sun Feb 20 11:12:40 UTC 2011

* [2011-02-20 10:51:37 +0000] Ben O'Steen <bosteen at gmail.com> écrit:

] I think that one of the crucial steps is to understand *when*
] information loss has actually happened. You may find that even if you
] have the complete record, the loss has occurred even before you
] attempt the translation.

One important thing when transliterating MARC to RDF, 
I think, is not to jump directly to things like bibo
and frbr. So IMO Dan's intuition that this is necessary
is correct.

An earlier revision of the openbiblio software, when
we were importing MARC records rather than dealing with
the BL RDF had a script (which is probably still in
there but might need some TLC to bring it up to snuff)
that did this. It took a MARC record, transformed it
into a slightly idiosyncratic but more or less direct
transliteration of the MARC record (losing ordering 
in fields unfortunatel). Then on subsequent passes
it would evolve entities like books or manifestations
or works or authors out of that MARC/RDF representation.
This process was kept track of in terms of OPMV Processes
and Artefacts.

If we were really clever, we could do this process of
evolving works and authors by writing inference rules
instead of explicitly coded python software but that's
a bit of a digression...

Cheers,
-w
-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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