Author: Juha Hakala

Director, IT development, The National Library of Finland

juha.hakala@helsinki.fi

Member of the ISNI working group

Abstract:
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) [1] is developing the International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729) as a standard identifier for public identities of parties. At the time of writing (December 2009) the document has reached Draft International Standard status. Much information is available at http://www.isni.org/ [2], including a useful FAQ [3]. This article describes the standard and potential implementation challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

DIMAG and IngestList at the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg

Author: Dr. Christian Keitel

In digital archiving, doing something is better than doing nothing at all. Unfortunately, doing something even very basic one can run into problems. Many problems are based on the short lifespan of formats and data carriers. In other words, how can we transfer a logical representation with all its significant properties to another physical form? Is it possible to validate the new form in an automated way? This article reports how the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg tries to address these topics. Read the rest of this entry »

Autoren: M. Brodersen (DNB), S. Wolf (BSZ)

Zusammenfassung
Im Rahmen der erweiterten Ablieferungspflicht von Publikationen aus institutionellen und fachlichen Repositorien schlägt die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek vor, das Verfahren auf dem eingeführten XMetaDiss-Format aufzubauen und es in der Art zu verwenden, wie es das Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg zu XMetaDissPlus erweitert hat: durch ein "Gemeinsames Vokabular der Publikationstypen" wird die Beschränkung von XMetaDiss auf Dissertationen und Habilitationen aufgehoben und Dokumentarten wie Preprints, Aufsätze und audiovisuelle Materialien können transportiert werden. Das Gemeinsame Vokabular dient ebenfalls der weiteren Standardisierung, z.B. im Rahmen der Setbildung im DINI-Zertifikat für Dokumenten- und Publikationsservices oder Suchdiensten wie Base der UB Bielefeld. Read the rest of this entry »

ISO/DIS 25964-1 (compare our news item at [1]) has recently been released by ISO TC46/SC 9, as a draft available for public comment, in English language only. It is available from ISO as pdf (5 MB) or paper version, both at a cost of 98 CHF [2].

Information and documentation. Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies, Part 1:
Thesauri for information retrieval
Revises: ISO 2788:1986. Revises: ISO 5964:1985
134 pages

From now on until 26 March 2010, the ISO balloting process will take place, inviting comments and voting through the national standards bodies.
The publication, commenting and balloting procedure is, however, different in every country.

UK
In the UK, the DIS will be available for anyone to purchase from BSI at 20 pounds. This may sound like a high price, but it is much less than the price at ISO or the one applied when the standard eventually is approved. BSI will soon also provide a tool for viewing the draft online and submitting comments, whether or not you live in the UK [3]. The BSI national committee will review all of the comments received before formulating a UK response to the DIS.

In some other countries, the DIS might only be submitted to the national TC 46/SC9 committee for comments and voting. For details, you will have to ask your national standards body.

Germany
Please find below the details regarding Germany, in German, received by DIN NABD:

Der Text wird den 21 Mitarbeitern des NABD 9 zugaenglich gemacht und nur die koennen direkt kommentieren bzw. am Balloting teilnehmen. Die Livelink Notification E-Mail zum Balloting, mit kostenlosem Zugang zum Text des DIS, wird zeitnah an die Mitarbeiter des NABD 9 versendet. Die Geschäftsstelle des NABD organisiert das deutsche Balloting über das Livelink System. Von dort erfolgt die Weitergabe des konsolidierten Ergebnisses an die ISO.

Wenn deutschen Kollegen Mitarbeiter der NABD bekannt sind, koennen sie Kommentare an diese Personen geben.
Kommentare, die als Blog Comments hier im TWR-Blog abgegeben oder mir als Email (traugott.koch@mpdl.mpg.de) zugeschickt werden, koennen von mir als Teil meiner konsolidierten Stellungnahme an die Geschaeftsstelle des NABD weitergereicht werden.

[1] http://metadaten-twr.org/2009/05/27/new-iso-thesaurus-standard-under-development/

[2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=53657

[3] http://drafts.bsigroup.com/

In 2005, IFLA started “Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR)” as a working group in the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) family. The group was supposed to focus on subject authority data (information about subjects from authority files) and its use in a wide range of applications, the semantics, structures and interoperability issues of such data, independent from any implementation or specific context.

In June this year, the FRSAR working group published a second draft of a “Conceptual Model” [1]. It focuses on general functional requirements and the potential of subject authority data for broad sharing and use.

This draft was open for comments and review until the end of July in order for discussions by the Working Group during the IFLA 2009 conference in mid-August in Milan. Further comments can be sent to mzeng@kent.edu.

The core of the model on the aboutness of works is the following:

work <<has as subject/is subject of>> thema <<has appellation/is appellation of>> nomen

The relationships between the three entities are many-to-many relationships and bi-directional. However, in a given controlled vocabulary and within a domain, a nomen should be an appellation of only one thema.

“Thema” is defined as “any entity that can be subject of a work”. Thema includes any of the entities which are originally defined by FRBR: work, expression, manifestation, item; person, corporate body; concept, object, event, place and all other subjects “work” might have.
The entity “Nomen” and the relationships ‘Thema has appellation Nomen/ Nomen is appellation of Thema’ are new proposals of the working group. “Nomen” is any sign or sequence of signs (alphanumeric characters, symbols etc.) by which a “Thema” is known, referred to or addressed as.

Two co-chairs of the working group, Marcia Zeng and Maja Zumer, compare the FRSAR model in a paper presented at IFLA 2009 [2] with related models (new thesauri standards BS8723 and ISO 25964-1; SKOS, OWL and the DCMI Abstract Model). They conclude that these models match rather well with the FRASAR conceptual model, and thus, that subject authority data that are modeled according to FRSAD and encoded in SKOS or OWL will have a high potential of interoperability and contribute to linked data and the semantic web.

[1] IFLA (2009). Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD). A Conceptual Model. IFLA Working Group on FRSAR. 2nd draft 2009-06-10.http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf

[2] Zeng, Marcia and Zumer, Maja (2009). Introducing FRSAD and mapping it with SKOS and other models. 75th IFLA General Conference, Papers, 23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy. Available in 5 languages.
http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html