Skip to content

Tag Archives: metadata

100,000 Books and FRBR

Monday, January 5, 2009

The news about 100,000 books on Freebase got me poking around with curl. I was pleased to see that Freebase actually distinguishes between a book as a work, and a particular edition of that book. To FRBR aficionados this will be familiar as the difference between a Work and a Manifestation:
For example here is a [...]

Filed in metadata, semweb | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

bibliovirus

Monday, November 3, 2008

Terry’s analysis of the proposed changes to OCLC’s record policy is essential reading. I’m really concerned that these 996 fields will slip somewhat unnoticed into data that I use.

996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. $uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup

This appears to be an engineered, [...]

Filed in libraries, marc, metadata | Also tagged , , , | Comments (3)

SKOS in the Context of Semantic Web Deployment

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

If you happen to be in the DC area on May 8th and are interested in linked data and the practical application of semantic web technologies like RDF and OWL please join us at the Library of Congress for a presentation by Alistair Miles, key developer of SKOS, and semantic web practitioner at the University [...]

Filed in libraries, opensource, semweb | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

literals and resources

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

There’s a fascinating modeling discussion going on over on the DC-RDA list about whether RDA properties should reference literals or resources in descriptions. For example when describing an author you could use a literal:

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910

or a resource:

http://lccn.loc.gov/n79021164

There are some shades of gray in between (using blank nodes, auto-generated URIs, typed literals) but that’s the [...]

Filed in libraries, marc, metadata, semweb | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (2)

oai-ore post baltimore thoughts

Thursday, March 13, 2008

The recent OAI-ORE meeting was just up the road in Baltimore, so it was easy for a bunch of us from the Library of Congress to attend. I work on a team at LC that is specifically looking at the role that repositories play at the library; I’ve implemented OAI-PMH data providers and harvesters, and [...]

Filed in libraries, metadata, web | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

oai-ore and the shadow web

Friday, February 22, 2008

The OAI-ORE meeting is coming up, and in general I’ve been really impressed with the alpha specs that have come out. It’s not clear that there’s an established vocabulary for talking about aggregated resources on the web, so the Data Model and Vocabulary documents were of particular interest to me.
One thing I didn’t quite understand, [...]

Filed in libraries, metadata, semweb, web | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (5)

WoGroFuBiCo wc

Thursday, January 10, 2008

word
count

library
263

bibliographic
236

data
170

libraries
144

lc
127

control
109

information
98

cataloging
91

records
88

subject
82

materials
81

standards
81

use
80

congress
79

work
76

record
73

community
67

users
61

working
59

group
58

access
57

recommendations
56

resources
53

authority
52

metadata
47

future
46

new
40

environment
37

development
37

web
36

collections
35

systems
35

available
35

creation
35

services
34

headings
32

national
31

findings
30

research
30

unique
29

sharing
29

oclc
28

model
28

catalog
28

international
27

develop
27

value
27

lcsh
26

pcc
26

user
26

need
26

report
25

make
25

practices
25

rda
25

used
25

time
24

needs
24

rare
24

including
24

provide
23

discovery
23

communities
23

special
23

frbr
23

current
22

resource
22

rules
22

digital
21

cooperative
21

program
21

participants
21

management
21

service
20

dc
20

programs
20

online
20

costs
20

washington
20

standard
19

support
19

knowledge
19

different
19

appropriate
19

effort
18

applications
18

marc
18

shared
18

exchange
18

process
18

changes
17

lcs
17

increase
16

public
16

search
16

creating
16

broader
16

catalogs
16

controlled
16

I converted the pdf to text file called ‘lc’ with xpdf and then wrote a little python:

#!/usr/bin/env python
 
from urllib import urlopen
from re import sub
 
stop_words = urlopen(’http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/idom/ir_resources/linguistic_utils/stop_words’).read().split()
text = file(’lc’).read()
 
counts = {}
for word in text.split():
word = word.lower()
word = sub(r’\W’, ”, word)
word = sub(r’\d+’, ”, word)
[...]

Filed in libraries, python | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

metadata hackers

Monday, December 31, 2007

I opened the paper this morning to read a story of another person involved in the creation of MARC who has just died. I hadn’t realized before reading Henrietta Avram and Samuel Snyder’s obituaries that there was a bit of an NSA LC connection when MARC was being created.

From 1964 to 1966, [Samuel Snyder] [...]

Filed in marc, metadata, programming | Also tagged , , , | Comments (1)

good ore

Friday, November 2, 2007

In case you missed it the Object-Reuse-and-Exchange (ORE) folks are having a get together at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) on March 3, 2008. It’s free to register, but space is limited. The Compound information objects whitepaper, May 2007 Technical Committee notes and the more recent Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of [...]

Filed in metadata, publishing, web | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)