Folks:
Three new and important vocabularies from RDA have been registered:
RDA Content Type: http://metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/45.html
RDA Carrier Type: http://metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/46.html
RDA Media Type: http://metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/37.html
I think it's interesting to point out how different these vocabularies
are, both in their structure and how they're represented in the RDA
text. Content type is from Chapter 6, and is presented as a relatively
flat vocabulary (e.g., no hierarchy) and includes definitions and scope
notes. You can take a look at "cartographic dataset" to see how the
simple table in the text can be translated into a much richer and more
useful form:
http://metadataregistry.org/concept/show/id/510.html
Simply by separating the definition from the scope note and providing
simple thesaural relationships from those notes, we have something much
more functional. Interestingly, the Registry makes all those
relationships reciprocal, so there are gaps in the vocabulary simply
because the textual underpinning for the relationships only goes in one
direction. For example, looking at the image above, there is a scope
note that explains the relationship to "cartographic image" but in the
listing for "cartographic image" there is only a related term, with no
explanation of why the relationship exists. Ideally, there should be
something there for human use (machines don't particularly care).
In contrast, the RDA Carrier Type vocabulary, located in Chapter 3, is a
two level hierarchy, with the top concepts seemingly intended as
gathering devices, not for application in data. In the text, these
terms lack definitions, and what little disambiguation we have comes
from the organization (the gathering category) and a few footnotes,
which are really scope notes. Below is one of the "top concept"
gathering terms, with its narrower relationships specified:
In this vocabulary, the footnotes have been converted to scope notes,
but for now the obvious alternate terms, even those that relate to the
scope note itself, have not been entered. Below is the term "audio
roll" and the scope note converted from a footnote. The note suggests
that an obvious alternative term for audio roll would be "piano roll."
The RDA Media Type vocabulary is very short and non-hierarchical, and
correlates to the gathering categories of the carrier types (which
suggests to me that perhaps they ought not to be all that separate).
Like the content types, these come with definitions and (sometimes)
scope notes:
All of these vocabularies are up to date as of the Oct. 31, 2008 text
available in the constituency review documents. I should note that as
usual when I do wholesale vocabulary registration, I uncover a few bugs
here and there, and you might see a few funky places where the status is
"published" instead of "new-proposed" and the language is something
you've never heard of--I will be going through and fixing those within
the next couple of days so they should be corrected shortly. I'll also
be writing up the problem so that Jon, the put-upon registry developer,
can at least add them to his bug list (I'll have to wrestle with them a
bit more until they're fixed, for a number of reasons).
One of the questions I've been posing to all and sundry about all this
is that of the usability of the vocabularies without definitions. My
contention is that they're better than nothing, but won't lead to the
consistency we're looking for without definitions, scope notes, and
alternative terms. Karen Coyle and I were messing around with this idea
sometime (maybe a year?) ago, and came up with an addition to the
carrier type vocabulary that illustrated what it could look like (it's
in the Registry Sandbox):
http://sandbox.metadataregistry.org/concept/show/id/517.html. I do
think that looking at something fully fleshed out serves to illustrate
nicely the paucity of the current Carrier Type vocabulary.
The other question is how these vocabularies should be enhanced and
extended. Shortly (we hope) the Registry team will announce some
enhanced functionality that will add the ability for interested parties
to discuss enhancements, at the concept or term level, in ways that can
lead to some consensus based proposals for missing pieces or extensions.
Unfortunately the RDA text gives instructions that limit the kinds of
other kinds of "bottom up" options to determine from usage where the
vocabularies need to be extended. The instructions for when no current
term from the vocabularies are available come straight from MARC-- one
gets to use "other" or in some cases, "unspecified." Wouldn't it make
more sense to allow catalogers to fill in what they think it should be,
as free text, so that the data could be mined on a regular basis to see
what the needs are in the community? Even errors, where there IS a term
but the cataloger didn't recognize that the chosen text term should have
been something else, helps establish the kinds of alternative labels
that help the next person down the road. "Other" and "Unspecified" are
dead ends and should be unceremoniously rejected (they will not--repeat
NOT--be added to the vocabularies while I have breath).
Well, enough for this New Year's Day. I look forward to some comments
and suggestions ...
Regards,
Diane
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Diane I. Hillmann
Director of Metadata Initiatives
Information Institute of Syracuse
Partner, Metadata Management Associates
Website: http://managemetadata.org
Email: [log in to unmask]
Voice: (607) 387-9207
Fax: (607) 387-4867
Skype: dihillmann
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