Hi Ray,
Regardless of which set of bibliographic elements (metadata vocabulary) is
used, it is necessary to agree on a transfer format in order to exchange any
metadata - via ZNG or otherwise.
The following possible alternatives have been proposed in relation to ZNG:
Dublin Core, ONIX, MARC and RDF.
RDF seems to have a number of technical and political advantages as a
general format, regardless of which metadata vocabulary is used:
- RDF is recommended by the W3C as the basis for metadata on the Web
- RDF can handle different metadata vocabularies including MARC, DC and
others
- RDF includes a flexible XML encoding method and a RDF Schema language
1 - Dublin Core.
================
Dublin Core includes a limited set of metadata tags.
DC is basically independent of specific transfer formats, but the DCMI
recommends to encode Simple Dublin Core Metadata in XML as RDF constructs.
Ref.: http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/04/11/dcmes-xml/
2 - ONIX
========
ONIX specify another set of metadata tags together with a DTD for a simple
XML encoding.
Ref.: http://www.editeur.org/onix.html
3 - MARC
========
The Open Archives Initiative has specified an XML Schema for encoding a
subset of the ISO 2709 (a.k.a. MARC) format.
The OAI MARC/XML DTD is independent of specific metadata vocabularies (i.e.
flavours of MARC fields and subfields).
Ref.: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/oai_marc.xsd
4 - RDF
=======
RDF is recommended by the W3C as a general framework for exchange of
metadata information in the context of the "Semantic Web Activity". The RDF
specifications provide a lightweight ontology system to support the exchange
of knowledge on the Web.
RDF includes an open ended model based on predicate logic plus a XML
encoding method and a RDF Schema language.
RDF can handle different metadata vocabularies.
Ref.: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
Best regards,
Poul Henrik
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