[topicmapmail] MARCXTM

[Murray Altheim]

Lars Heuer wrote:
> Hi Suellen,
> 
>> Does anyone know the status of Professor Hyun-Sil Lee's work on 
>> MARCXTM.  An overview was detailed  in the selected papers of TMRA 
>> 2005. Also see:
> 
>> <http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~tmra05/PRES/SHY.ppt>
> 
> They came to the conclusion that MARC and XTM do not fit. Steve Pepper
> and others tried to convice them that MARC and *Topic Maps* would be a
> good combination. But I've no idea if they started to follow that
> path.

A strange conclusion, to be sure. Given that XTM is a graph structure
with minimal intrusive native semantics it has demonstrably been used
to model graphs, trees, ordered and unordered lists;  included within
this would be traditional fielded (and sub-fielded) database record
schemas/formats.

There's no *technical* reason I can see why XTM couldn't be used to
mark up MARC records, and indeed I'd looked into doing exactly that
a few years ago when I did some investigation into bibliographic
formats and surveyed the various schemas at some length.

I looked into MARC but for my purposes it's really overkill -- it's
designed for complete library resource lifecycle support, not just
bibliographic info -- and I settled on use of BibTeX. I even found
a nice BibTeX parser in Java but unfortunately the author only
released it in GPL and was unwilling to change the license prior to
taking a job at Google. *sigh* One of my many cul de sacs. Suffice
it to say that both BibTeX and Dublin Core have been part of my work,
and MARC is just a Jolly Green Giant version of BibTeX. The only
tricky part of MARC to make *efficient* would be how to handle
subfields, but really, I'd just create the entire set of MARC fields
and subfields as XTM PSIs and use them as occurrence type topics. I'd
started working up a set of PSI files in LTM for that but I don't
know where they are right now. Could dig them up I suppose, can't
remember their finished state right now. I will likely be doing
some MARC-to-XTM conversions later this year myself (not of the
entirety of MARC, just a subset) so I may have to.

Given that there are quite a number of crosswalks and crosswalk
tools available it would only be a matter of time and energy to
create an XSLT transformation from either MARC or preferably MARCXML
or MODS/MADS to XTM.

See:  http://www.loc.gov/marc/marc.html
       http://www.loc.gov/marc/marctools.html

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

        In the evening
        The rice leaves in the garden
        Rustle in the autumn wind
        That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu