UNIMARC, RDA and the Semantic Web Gordon Dunsire Presented at Les Journées ABES May 2010, Montpellier, France (Originally presented at WLIC 2009, Milan, Italy)

UNIMARC  A carrier format intended for the exchange of bibliographic metadata between the systems used by national agencies  Goals  Maintain and develop in alignment with other MARC formats and new bibliographic standards.  Enhance portability of data to the Web environment and interoperability with other standards.  Improve availability of documentation.  Promotion, dissemination, user support.

UNIMARC – ISBD - FRBR  UNIMARC is aligned with International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD)  Specifies data elements and their display  ISBD is aligned with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)  User-focused model for bibliographic data  All 3 standards maintained by IFLA groups UNIMARCISBDFRBR

RDA: resource description and access  New metadata standard for describing the content of information resources  Designed for the digital environment  Built on 100+ years of experience in developing the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR)  Intended for international use  Focus on library collections, but seeks compatibility with metadata in related communities  E.g. Archives, museums, and publishers

RDA – FRBR - FRAD  RDA aligned with FRBR  RDA attributes grouped by FRBR entities  RDA also aligned with Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD)  Also maintained by IFLA  FRBR aligned with FRAD  Part of the “Functional Requirements” family RDAFRBRFRAD

RDA - ISBD  RDA is not designed for any specific metadata carrier format  But mappings developed from RDA elements to ISBD and MARC21 formats to maximise integration with existing data RDAISBD RDAMARC21

Material designation  ISBD and AACR use the device of a general material designation (GMD)  Early warning to catalogue users of how resource content is to be accessed and used  Through a particular human sense (sight, hearing, etc.)  With a specific intermediation device (computer, magnifier, etc.)  GMDs do not clearly separate content mediation (e.g. Sight) from carrier mediation (e.g. Magnifier)

ISBD area 0  New area covering content form and media type  Separates content type (form) from carrier (media) type  RDA has also developed separate content and carrier categories  Partial alignment between ISBD and RDA categories  Some are exact matches  Framework underlying RDA categories can be applied to ISBD to improve alignment

RDA/ONIX framework  An ontology developed by RDA and the publishing community to improve metadata interoperability  Set of low-level attributes combined to form high-level content and carrier types for RDA  E.g. RDA content type “spoken word”  Category attributes  Character: Language  SensoryMode: Hearing  ImageDimensionality: not applicable  ImageMovement: not applicable

Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF)  Project to extend the RDA/ONIX framework  June-November 2009  Extension covers roles and relationships between bibliographic entities and agents  E.g. Manifestation:hasManufacturer:Publisher  E.g. WorkA:isDerivedFrom:WorkB  Framework extended to cover other standards  CIDOC Content Reference Model (CRM), Dublin Core (DC), FRBR, IEEE-Learning Object Metadata (LOM), MARC21

VMF RDA VMF (RDA/ONIX+) MARC21CRM LOM ONIX FRBR

Alignments  Alignments are not exact (one-to-one)  Mappings may be fuzzy, partial or out-of-date  Some are latent within underlying schemas  E.g. RDA/ONIX framework  Development of one standard may not be synchronised with aligned standards  Standards independently maintained  Aligned standards may be subsequently re- examined and developed  Alignment drift may be amplified in a chain of mappings

The (partial) chain RDA VMF (RDA/ONIX+) ONIX CRM LOM FRBRUNIMARCISBD FRAD MARC21

From UNIMARC to RDA and back again UNIMARCISBDRDA UNIMARCISBDFRBRRDA MARC21UNIMARC 2001 mapping between UNIMARC and MARC21 Time to review alignments?

Importance of (mis-)alignment  Impact on national cataloguing rules  E.g. Italian rules  New rules - FRBR?  Current rules - UNIMARC  But FRBR - RDA - ISBD - UNIMARC  Significant impact on new rules?  Semantic Web  Linked-data depends on (semantic) alignments

(Semantic) web  1997 mapping from UNIMARC to Dublin Core  UNIMARCXML also available  DCMI RDA Task Group is expressing RDA vocabularies for attributes and values in Semantic Web formats  VMF project intends to do the same  Similar initiatives elsewhere  FRBR namespaces, LCSH, etc. UNIMARCDC

To the future  Semantic Web allows “mash-up” of metadata from different sources using different standards  Publication statement from publisher; subject from author; summary from user; ? from cataloguer  Applying FRBR will help  Multi-lingual sources easier to interoperate  “gesprochene Worte” has same identifier as “spoken word”  Time to review UNIMARC and the Web?

Thank you 