Thursday, March 29, 2007

MODS Implementation Registry

The MODS Implementation Registry contains descriptions of MODS projects planned, in progress, and fully implemented. It provides the MODS community with important information about how MODS is being used in various projects throughout the world.

Please review your entry if you have one or submit any new ones. Institutions and organizations who are implementing or planning to implement MODS should submit the following information to the Network Development and MARC Standards Office (ndmso@loc.gov) at the Library of Congress.

  1. Name of the institution or organization implementing MODS
  2. The MODS project name
  3. A short description of the MODS project
  4. Projected dates of implementation
  5. A URL to the MODS project web site (if available)
  6. A URL to any available documentation or specifications developed for the MODS project
  7. A list of any MODS tools developed and or used as part of the MODS project
  8. The MODS version used in the project
  9. Contact name and e-mail address

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Microformats

As a cataloger who appreciates all forms of structured mark-up, I'm putting this on my to-read list. Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 I like microformats and hope they become more widespread on the Web. Can't link to WorldCat, since it has yet to make it into any libraries.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Schematron

Schematron is an XML schema language that sounds better than what we have been using for our data. It allows for data validation. O'Reilly has a paid downloadable PDF on Schematron.
Schematron is a rule-based XML schema language, offering flexibility and power that W3C XML schema, RELAX NG, and DTDs simply can't match.

You need Schematron and can't settle for other languages if you have to check rules that go beyond checking the document structures (i.e., checking that an element bar is included in element foo) and their datatypes. Schematron is the right tool for checking conditions such as "startDate is earlier than or equal to endDate."

Schematron is also the right tool to use if you have to raise user-friendly error messages rather than depend on error messages that are generated by a schema processor and that are often obscure. Schematron builds on XPath. You will need to understand XPath to to get the most from Schematron.