A weblog following developments around the world in FRBR: Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records.

Maintained by William Denton, Web Librarian at York University. Suggestions and comments welcome at wtd@pobox.com.


Confused? Try What Is FRBR? (2.8 MB PDF) by Barbara Tillett, or Jenn Riley's introduction. For more, see the basic reading list.

Books: FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed by Robert Maxwell (ISBN 9780838909508) and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools edited by Arlene Taylor (ISBN 9781591585091) (read my chapter FRBR and the History of Cataloging).

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Styles, Ayers, Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web

Posted by: William Denton, 5 February 2008 7:39 am
Categories: Blog Mentions,MARC,Semantic Web,Vendors

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.