inkdroid

Alistair wanted to have some data to demonstrate the potential of linked library data, so I quickly converted 10K MARC records (using a slightly modified version of MARC21slim2RDFDC.xsl and rewrote the subjects as lcsh.info URIs using a few lines of python…all a bit hackish, but it got this particular job done quickly.

The rewriting of subjects is basically a transformation of:

<http://lccn.loc.gov/00009010#manifestation>
  dc:creator "Rollo, David.";
  dc:date "c2000." ;
  dc:description "Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-223) and index." ;
  dc:identifier
     "URN:ISBN:0816635463 (alk. paper)",
     "URN:ISBN:0816635471 (pbk. : alk. paper)",
     "http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy032/00009010.html" ;
  dc:language "eng" ;
  dc:publisher "Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press," ;
  dc:subject
    "Anglo-Norman literature",
    "Benoi?t, de Sainte-More, 12th cent.",
    "Latin prose literature, Medieval and modern",
    "Literacy",
    "Literature and history",
    "Magic in literature." ;
  dc:title "Glamorous sorcery : magic and literacy in the High Middle Ages /" ;
  dc:type "text" .

to:

<http://lccn.loc.gov/00009010#manifestation>
    dc:creator "Rollo, David." ;
    dc:date "c2000." ;
    dc:description "Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-223) and
index." ;
    dc:identifier "URN:ISBN:0816635463 (alk. paper)", "URN:ISBN:0816635471 (pbk. : alk. paper)", "http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy032/00009010.html" ;
    dc:language "eng" ;
    dc:publisher "Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press," ;
    dc:subject <http://lcsh.info/sh85005082#concept>,
      <http://lcsh.info/sh85077482#concept>,
      <http://lcsh.info/sh85077565#concept>,
      <http://lcsh.info/sh85079624#concept>,
      <http://lcsh.info/sh86008161#concept>,
      "Benoi?t, de Sainte-More, 12th cent." ;
    dc:title "Glamorous sorcery : magic and literacy in the High Middle Ages
/" ;
    dc:type "text" .

Clearly there are lots of ways to improve even this simplified description: URIs for entries in the Name Authority File, referencing identifiers as resources rather than string literals (an artifact of the XSLT transform), removing ISBD punctuation, unicode normalization (&cough;), etc.

You may notice I kind of fudged the URI for the book itself using the LCCN service at LC: http://lccn.loc.gov/00009010#manifestation (which does resolve, but doesn’t serve up RDF yet). I’m no FRBR expert so I’m not sure if the use of “manifestation” in this hash URI makes sense. I just wanted to distinguish between the URI for the description, and the URI for the thing being described. I think it’s high time for me to understand FRBR a lot more.

If you prefer diagrams to turtle here is a graph visualization from the w3c rdf validator for the record.