A MADS/RDF ontology developed at the Library of Congress is available for a public review period until Jan. 14, 2011. The MADS/RDF (Metadata Authority Description Schema in RDF) vocabulary is a data model for authority and vocabulary data used within the library and information science (LIS) community, which is inclusive of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions. It is presented as an OWL ontology.
Documentation and the ontology are available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/rdf/
Based on the MADS/XML schema, MADS/RDF provides a means to record data from the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) Authorities format in RDF for use in semantic applications and Linked Data projects. MADS/RDF is a knowledge organization system designed for use with controlled values for names (personal, corporate, geographic, etc.), thesauri, taxonomies, subject heading systems, and other controlled value lists. It is closely related to SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System and a widely supported and adopted RDF vocabulary. Unlike SKOS, however, which is very broad in its application, MADS/RDF is designed specifically to support authority data as used by and needed in the LIS community and its technology systems. Given the close relationship between the aim of MADS/RDF and the aim of SKOS, the MADS ontology has been fully mapped to SKOS.
Community feedback is encouraged and welcomed. The MODS listserv – MADS/XML is maintained as part of the community work on MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) – is the preferred forum for feedback: http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/mods.html (send mail to: mods@listserv.loc.gov). Kevin Ford, the primary architect of the model, will be responding on that forum in order to have an open discussion.
2010-11-21