our standards vs their standards

Our Standards vs. Their Standards: Development and Re-Use of Non-Library Standards in the Cultural Heritage Domain

Lars G. Svensson

| 20 | Our Standards vs. Their Standards | August 19, 20151

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Information exchange in libraries has gone a long way during the last 50 years


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3 | 20 | Our Standards vs. Their Standards | August 19, 2015

Libraries increasingly exchange information with organisations that are not libraries (or at least they should!)

Search engine

Library Re-searcher

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But how do we do that in an interoperable way?

ILS

MARC only beyond this point


By using common data standards!

ISOOpen Geospatial (OGC)

W3C

IEEE

IETF


What we want to share is knowledge, but the best we can do is to share data

Knowledge

DataData

Information Information

Knowledge

Sender Receiver


That data, however, should be as machine-interpretable as possible

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Library data

Otherdata

Somedata


1) 123 < 123.456 < 124

2) 123 < 123,456 < 124

Example 1: Floating point numbers


1) 123 < 123.456 < 124

2) 123 < 123,456 < 124

float f = Float.valueOf( “123,456” );(Gives you a NumberFormatException)

Example 1: Floating point numbers


$c — Confidence valueDescribes the confidence of the agency using the process/activity identified in subfield $a to generate the linked field. The subfield contains a floating point value between 0 and 1. Either a comma or a point may be used as a decimal marker. 0 means no confidence and and [sic!] 1 means full confidence.(http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/bd883.html)

At some places, MARC 21 isn’t quite clear about this...


The most important date format is ISO 8601– 20150819 – 2015-08-19– 2015-08-19T07:30:00+02:00and its derivatives, e. g. EDTF– ~2015 (approximately 2015)– 201u (one of the years 2010-2019, but we don’t know which)

Example 2: (Birth-)Dates in Authority Data


MARC 21:– 100 $d 1240 or 41-ca. 1316 (for people)– 046 $f [1240,1241] $g ~1316 $2 EDTF (for machines)UNIMARC– 200 $f 1240 or 41-ca. 1316 (for people)– 640 $f #1240____? $i #1316____? (for machines)

In MARC, dates are expressed differently at different places


Example 3: Geographic coordinates


Library formats support bounding boxes and polygons

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Western_Cape_in_South_Africa.svg

Type Examples

Point POINT (30 10)

LineString LINESTRING (30 10, 10 30, 40 40)

Polygon

POLYGON ((30 10, 40 40, 20 40, 10 20, 30 10))

POLYGON ( (35 10, 45 45, 15 40, 10 20, 35 10), (20 30, 35 35, 30 20, 20 30))


A very important non-library format for coordinates is WKT (well-known text)

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Record the points in the polygon as long/lat and “list coordinate pairs in clockwise order, starting with the most south-eastern vertex of the polygon. [...] The first and last coordinate pairs are the same. [...] If an area or areas within a given polygon are excluded, list the coordinate pairs for any excluded area in counterclockwise order.“ (RDA §7.4.3.3)

The upcoming content standard RDA has instructions for coordinates too, but different ones…


“Record dates in terms of the calendar preferred by the agency creating the data” and to “record a date associated with a person by giving the year.” An option used by PCC, BL and D-A-CH is to “add the month or month and day in the form [year] [month] [day] or [year] [month]. Record the month in a language and script preferred by the agency creating the data.” (RDA §9.3.1.3)

Dates in RDA are not really aligned with ISO 8601, either

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So what we really need, is a system that mediates between the cataloguing code and the exchange format(s)

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And we must ensure that we export data using well-known, widely adopted standards

My dad’s standard is better than your dad’s!

Picture provided by e r j k p r u n c z y k (CC BY-SA): https://www.flickr.com/photos/24842486@N07/6162798898/ Picture by Pascal (CC BY): https://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/12144956203/

Who cares about your standard, anyway?

20 | 20 | Our Standards vs Their Standards | August 19, 2015

Common standards for future data exchange

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our standards vs their standards

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