Bibliographic metadata in IAO

_From z_califo...@shiftingbalance.org on February 15, 2010 15:27:35_

I need to organize a collection of bibliographic references and I would like to consider whether IAO ought to be expanded to allow the possibility of using it for that purpose. By "bibliographic," I mean any kind of human expression that can be cataloged, not just books.

To attempt to invent a new standard for bibliographic metadata is not a good idea, and moreover it would be a waste of time, since many such standards are in use today. The strategy should be to represent these metadata standards in IAO. I see three central issues.

(1) Provide a mechanism in IAO which allows users to apply any metadata standard they want. I have a few ideas about how to work this out which I can share with people in an IAO call.

(2) Realism about ontology. It's not clear whether the commonly used metadata standards describe works in a way which reflects their most salient aspect from an ontological point of view. I think there is going to have to be some compromise here, but it won't be too dear for realists.

(3) Making this work by surveying the available digital representations of the various metadata schemes and modeling them in OWL, so that someone could enter records by hand, in Protege; and creating parsers for importing records into an ontology en masse from the various catalogs and indexes.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/information-artifact-ontology/issues/detail?id=77

information-artifact-ontology / IAO

Bibliographic metadata in IAO #77