Publication of RDA Content, Carrier, and Media Type Vocabularies

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC), the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group (formerly DCMI/RDA Task Group), and ALA Publishing (on behalf of the co-publishers of RDA) are pleased to announce the publication of a second set of vocabulary terms as linked open data. The RDA Carrier Type, Content Type and Media Type vocabularies have been reviewed, approved, and their status in the Open Metadata Registry (OMR) changed to ‘published.’ The finished vocabularies can be viewed following the links from the terms above. (The links lead to the description of the vocabulary itself, the specific terms can be viewed under the tab for ‘concepts’).

Terms in the Content Type vocabulary refer to the intellectual or artistic content of a resource, such as text or notated music; terms in the Carrier Type vocabulary refer to the means and methods by which content is conveyed including volume, sheet, computer disk; terms in the Media Type vocabulary specify the general type of intermediation device (if any) required to view, play or run the content of a resource. These vocabularies are derived from the RDA/ONIX framework for resource categorization which established an extensible methodology for categorization of resources according to content and carrier.

Users of the RDA vocabularies on OMR may notice that German language terms in the Carrier Type, Content Type and Media Type vocabularies still have the status "newly proposed". "Terms" in the OMR are language specific labels, which can be displayed to aid readability, but the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is the persistent identifier for the underlying concept. The status of the German terms will be reviewed when the German translation has been completed and is stable.

Gordon Dunsire said "These vocabularies are crucial for the selection and identification of information resources. Their publication as linked data in RDF allows the terms to be used by all bibliographic metadata communities in the Semantic Web environment. I look forward to the future development and publication of mappings from the vocabularies to the RDA/ONIX Framework. Similar mappings of other content and carrier vocabularies, such as those for ISBD area 0, will support metadata interoperability between communities and improve resource discovery for all."

All the RDA vocabularies can be viewed in the OMR by using this page: http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm. Those interested in following the work of review and publication of the vocabularies can subscribe to the Registry RSS feeds linked from that page. Questions on the OMR can be conveyed using the ‘Feedback’ link on each Registry page. Questions or comments on the review process or the content of specific vocabularies may be addressed to the Chair of the JSC, Barbara Tillett [ btil@loc.gov ] Questions and comments on the encoding of the vocabularies or on the Open Metadata Registry may be addressed to Diane Hillmann [metadata.maven@gmail.com] or Gordon Dunsire [gordon@gordondunsire.com].

Date posted: 27 January 2012

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