From XML to MARC: RDF Behind the Scenes

Abstract

We collect heterogeneous metadata packages from various publishers. Although all of them are in XML, they vary a lot in terms of vocabulary, structure, granularity, precision, and accuracy. It is quite a challenge to cope with this jungle and recycling it to meet the needs of the Sudoc, the French academic union cataloguing system. How to integrate and enrich these metadata? How to integrate them in order to process them in a regular way, not through ad hoc processes? How to integrate them with specific or generic controlled vocabularies ? How to enrich them with author identifiers, for instance? RDF looks like the ideal solution for integration and enrichment. Metadata are stored in the Virtuoso RDF database and processed through a workflow steered by the Oracle DB. We will illustrate this generic solution with Oxford UP metadata: ONIX records for printed books and KBART package description for ebooks. So. A relational database as glue and pipeline engine… RDF as internal model… MARC as output …. Quite weird… Was this abstract written by an ELAG-specific random text generator?