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Gordon Dunsire on property chains and shortcuts in RDA/LRM

This is the first of two posts on the panel discussion “What role can RDA/RDF play in the transition to linked library data?” which took place during the 5th annual meeting of the BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe [1], and featured comments from five distinguished panelists [2]. This post is a transcription of the response from Gordon Dunsire (former chair of the RDA Steering Committee and current member of the RSC Technical Working Group [3]) to a question posed at the BIBFRAME Workshop, followed by an annotated version (annotated by Theo Gerontakos) engaging some of the areas discussed.

The question:

RDA/LRM/RDF contains elements that are essentially reified property chains in RDA, known as shortcuts, while BIBFRAME features many property chains that are not reified as specific elements – what many people call “nested” data. What are the pros and cons of property chains and reification, and do they cause interoperability problems?

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Posted on 1 Comment on Modeling LCSH Subject Headings as RDA Linked Data in Sinopia

Modeling LCSH Subject Headings as RDA Linked Data in Sinopia

We are writing a metadata application profile. We are following Library of Congress’ profile syntax for creating BIBFRAME profiles (http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/bibframe-profiles.html). Almost all our properties have been taken from Resource Description and Access (RDA; see https://www.rdatoolkit.org/about and the RDA Registry at https://www.rdaregistry.info). These are json profiles, intended to produce data input forms that output linked data. The data input forms will display in a linked data editor currently in development, Sinopia (https://sinopia.io/), allowing input specialists (catalogers, for example) to enter values for RDA properties. Once input, the data can be output as RDF data; that output is a presupposition of our work. In fact, we often create the profile in accordance with conceptual output we model for a given property. This entry illustrates that profile-creation practice: conceiving what data input form structures are required by modeling the form’s expected output; more specifically, this entry focuses on how the form outputs properties and values for subject headings (categories describing the content of a resource). The values are complex for library data because libraries traditionally use precoordinated headings (https://www2.archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/precoordinate-indexing) as values, which our model must accommodate. How? This illustration is not an exhaustive treatment of precoordinated headings but, rather, a clue toward a possible solution.

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