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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