Archive for the ‘Metadata’ Category
Amazon Offers Public Datasets… Bibliographic?
Interesting news that Amazon is going to be offering large public datasets up to the public through it’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) web service. Some examples included will be the annotated human genome data, various US Census, transportation, and economic databases. I’ve got an idea for a dataset they could add… how about MARCXML [...]
Evolutionist, Creationist… Relativist
This quote from Mark Diggory on the OAI-ORE mailing list:
[warning... stereotyping ahead]
This is an argument on a continuum of evolutionism vs. creationism… Evolutionist say, establish the smallest possible set of laws to enforce on a system and see what emergent behavior arises… while the Creationist say, define the entire mechanism, top to bottom, written in [...]
Bruce’s Answers to Dan’s Questions
Dan: Does the linked data movement really depend upon RDF? It doesn’t seem like it has to. Maybe it could grow faster if it didn’t.
Bruce: Let’s turn the question around and ask: if not RDF, then what? You definitely need some model on which to base it, it seems to me, and things like GRDDL, [...]
My Metadata Mini-Manifesto
How do we approach the problem of metadata (and which formats we should use)? In what way is metadata like cataloging and in what way is it different? What is metadata anyway?
I see metadata as cataloging. Libraries have a strong historical tradition of organizing materials. I think it is fair to [...]
RDF is “Easy As Learning English”
Hmm, seems I riled some folks up about RDF and didn’t even know it (until someone sent me a link today — too bad I wasn’t linked to in the original post). Anyway, I started to write a semi-long, semi-polite response to Shelley Powers, author of Practical RDF, in response to her blog entry titled [...]
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Lorcan Dempsey nails it, in my opinion, with his latest weblog entry, Making data work – Web 2.0 and catalogs. Among other things, it pulls together an interesting collection of links in support of his idea that we need to “make data work harder.” All of it resonates with me.
One of his links, O’Reilly’s “What [...]
The Jellybean Jar
Remember that contest where there is a jellybean jar full of jellybeans and the goal is to guess how many jellybeans there are in the jar? I think the MARC –> RDF question is a bit like that. RDF has been discussed lately on the MODS list (and a bit here). Ironically, there has been [...]
RDF: Show Me the Money
Bruce D’Arcus and I have been sending some emails back and forth about my last post on metadata interoperability. In a comment on the original post, he suggests RDF instead of XSLT crosswalks. In my reply, I referenced Bill Moen’s tongue-in-cheek comment about RDF (for the record, I don’t really believe it is too complicated [...]
Metadata Interoperability
I’m back from ALA. What a time! It was the first ALA conference I’ve been to and, I must say, I was amazed at the sheer number of librarians (I’ve been to AALL and MLA, but they aren’t anywhere near as large). It was a bit mind boggling, to me, to see librarians at every [...]
Versioning Metadata
At DLF a week or two ago, I heard an interesting idea that has, ever since, been bouncing around in my head a bit. The idea was to use XML namespaces as a way to version metadata values (yes, you heard me, values… not just the XML elements and attributes themselves (which is common)). Unfortunately, [...]