IFLA

From Ontology-Lexica Community Group

Use case description

IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions - www.ifla.org) has been involved in a number of projects to transform bibliographic concepts and metadata into the RDF format. As a result of these efforts, RDF representations of several models, namely FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), FRAD (Functional Requirements for Authority Data) and FRSAD (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data), have been created with the aim of supporting resource discovery. A new resource that is to be added to this list is MulDiCat, the Multilingual dictionary of cataloguing terms and concepts. It contains terms and definitions for many concepts used by the library cataloguing community. Moreover, these terms and definitions are available in several languages, since It is intended to be used at an international level for authoritative translations of IFLA cataloguing standards.

It is represented in SKOS, and in terms of lexical information it makes use of skos:definition for descriptions of terms, and skos:prefLabel for including labels in the different languages. It also uses the dct:source property to indicate the original source of the terms. Since only one SKOS preferred label has been allowed for each language, they do not even make use of the skos:altLabel property. In any case, they have realised how beneficial it would be to enrich such a vocabulary with additional linguistic and lexical information.

Example in lemon

Just to provide an example of the limitations of this approach, let’s have a look at the term “Creator” (restricting the example to English and Spanish):

@base <http://iflastandards.info/ns/muldicat#>
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>.
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace>.
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>.
@prefix reg: <http://metadataregistry.org/uri/schema/registry/>.
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>.
@prefix skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>.

:Creator reg:identifier <4674>;
	 reg:status <http://metadataregistry.org/uri/RegStatus/1001>;
	 a skos:Concept;
	 skos:broader :Agent;
	 skos:definition "A person, family, or corporate body responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of a work."@en;
         skos:definition "Una persona, familia o entidad corporativa responsable del contenido intelectual o artístico de una obra."@es;
	 skos:inScheme <http://iflastandards.info/ns/muldicat>;
	 skos:prefLabel "Creador"@es;
	  	        "Creator"@en.

In Spanish, "Creador" would have a masculine and a feminine form ("Creadora"), and this could be nicely represented in lemon in the following way (this is of course one possibility out of many, but illustrates the potential of lemon in this context):

:Creator lemon:isReferenceOf [lemon:isSenseOf muldicatLexiconEN:creator];
              lemon:isReferenceOf [lemon:isSenseOf muldicatLexiconES:creador].

muldicatLexiconEN:creator a lemon:LexicalEntry;
      lemon:form [lemon:writtenRep “Creator”@en.

muldicatLexiconES:creador a lemon:LexicalEntry;
      lemon:form [lemon:writtenRep “Creador”@es;
                  isocat:grammaticalGender isocat:masculine];
      lemon:form [lemon:writtenRep “Creadora”@es;
                  isocat:grammaticalGender isocat:feminine].

isocat:grammaticalGender rdfs:subPropertyOf lemon:property.

An additional plus would be to make explicit that one term in English is the literal translation of the others in Spanish, although this is not supported in the current version of lemon.