From record management to data management: RDA and new application models BIBFRAME, RIMMF, and OliSuite/WeCat

Where do we begin to analyze the bibliographic record? Why is it now proving inadequate in the context of the Semantic Web? The history of library catalogs and archives shows bibliographic records being widely used since ancient times as descriptions of the resources collected by libraries and archives. These descriptions are comprised of metadata. In the conventional sense of the term, metadata is data regarding other data: in the descriptive record of a book or a film, for example, the metadata is the title, the name of the author or director, the year of publication, and so on. The reflection provoked by RDA produced the awareness that the flat format of MARC 21 records is inadequate in expressing the relationships between bibliographic entities that the FRBR model and RDA standard consider fundamental. In the Semantic Web, MARC records are considered a valuable source of information for the vast amount of data and extensive semantic encoding they contain. The set of metadata collected to describe a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in the example MARC record below, is rich in detail and every tag/field identifies an element’s data type and its relation to the object described. In the context of the Semantic Web, individual elements can regain the meaning that the entire MARC record with tags gave them by transferring the tagged data into RDF statements with a subject, a predicate, and an object. RDF statements enable machines to understand the meaning, moving us from a traditional web to the Semantic Web. RIMMF and BIBFRAME indicate to software developers a way to think that is consistent with RDA. Software houses and bibliographic agencies are taken on the charge of following and facilitating the transition: OliSuite/WeCat provides an implementation of RDA that integrates vocabularies and ontologies already present in the Web by structuring the information in linked open data.