Web Ontology Language (OWL)

Some papers from HP Labs concerning the Web Ontology Language (OWL)

• An OWL Full Interpretation by Jeremy Carrooll HPL-2008-60
  
  This report is an appendix to report HPL-2008-59. It gives a worked example of the construction used in the proof from that report. For finiteness, a reduced datatype map consisting of only xsd:boolean is used. Each of the graphs in the construction is listed explicitly, with some redundancy eliminated. The final Herbrand graph contains about 15,000 triples.
  
  
• The Consistency of OWL Full (with proofs) by Jeremy Carroll and Dave Turner HPL-2008-59
  
  We show that OWL1 Full without the comprehension principles is consistent, and does not break most RDF graphs that do not use the OWL vocabulary. We discuss the role of the comprehension principles in OWL semantics, and how to maintain the relationship between OWL Full and OWL DL by reinterpreting the comprehension principles as permitted steps when checking an entailment, rather than as model theoretic principles constraining the universe of interpretation. Starting with such a graph we build a Herbrand model, using, amongst other things, an RDFS ruleset, and syntactic analogs of the semantic "if and only if" conditions on the RDFS and OWL vocabulary. The ordering of these steps is carefully chosen, along with some initialization data, to break the cyclic dependencies between the various conditions. The normal Herbrand interpretation of this graph as its own model then suffices. The main result follows by using an empty graph in this construction. We discuss the relevance of our results, both to OWL2, and more generally to a future revision of the Semantic Web recommendations. This longer version contains the proofs.
  
  
• The Consistency of OWL Full by Jeremy Carroll and Dave Turner HPL-2008-58
  
  We show that OWL1 Full without the comprehension principles is consistent, and does not break most RDF graphs that do not use the OWL vocabulary. We discuss the role of the comprehension principles in OWL semantics, and how to maintain the relationship between OWL Full and OWL DL by reinterpreting the comprehension principles as permitted steps when checking an entailment, rather than as model theoretic principles constraining the universe of interpretation. Starting with such a graph we build a Herbrand model, using, amongst other things, an RDFS ruleset, and syntactic analogs of the semantic "if and only if" conditions on the RDFS and OWL vocabulary. The ordering of these steps is carefully chosen, along with some initialization data, to break the cyclic dependencies between the various conditions. The normal Herbrand interpretation of this graph as its own model then suffices. The main result follows by using an empty graph in this construction. We discuss the relevance of our results, both to OWL2, and more generally to a future revision of the Semantic Web recommendations. Publication Info: Submitted to ISWC 2008 b1 s 7th International Semantic Web Conference, Karlsruhe

MARC 2 MODS Tool

The Digital Library Federation announces a revision to their MARCXML to MODS tool.

The DLF Aquifer Metadata Working Group announces an update to the XML stylesheet they have developed for the Aquifer project, for conversion of MARCXML records to MODS. The current stylesheet, DLF_MARC2MODS_1.34.xsl, can be found from a link on our MARC to Aquifer MODS XSLT Stylesheet page. Changes are briefly documented in the comments at the beginning of the stylesheet. We have also updated the Introduction pages that give more detail about some of the changes.

The changes include re-added mapping for tag 510 citations to the note element for monographs only; added subject:hierarchicalGeographic element mapping of tag 662 Subject - Hierarchical Place Name; added mapping of tags 561 (ownership) and 581 (publications) to the note element, removed mapping of 007 specific material designation to the genre element when the value is "remote", and a correction to no longer repeat mapping of dates from the Leader to originInfo:date when the date type is "questionable".

MARC Update

Update No. 8 (October 2007) was recently released in multiple document formats. It includes changes made to the MARC 21 formats resulting from proposals which were considered by the ALA ALCTS/LITA/RUSA Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI), the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) and the BIC Bibliographic Standards Group in 2007.

The printed update is available through the Cataloging Distribution Service.
It includes pages for fields that have been changed, with changes marked with side lining. PDF of those printed update pages are also available online

D-Lib Magazine

The May/June 2008 issue of D-Lib Magazine is now available.

Some articles of interest include:

• PREMIS With a Fresh Coat of Paint: Highlights from the Revision of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata Brian F. Lavoie, OCLC Online Computer Library Center
• Adding Value to the Library Catalog by Implementing a Recommendation System Michael Moennich and Marcus Spiering, Karlsruhe University Library

I found the one on the recommendation system interesting. They are selling the service as an add-on to the OPAC. LibraryThing for Libraries is doing the same with their data. Syndantics has been doing this for quite some time with cover images and reviews. Seems to be a trend here, 2nd party additions to the OPAC supplying services based on data collected elsewhere. In the article world, there was some research done collecting OpenURL data to rate papers.

xOCLCnum

A new service from OCLC.

I'd like to announce and invite you to try xOCLCnum, the latest in the xIdentifier family of Web services from OCLC.

Just as xISBN allows you to find all related editions of a book by entering its ISBN, xOCLCnum does the same thing using OCLC number.

xOCLCnum is queried using a simple URL format, and returns an XML response with both related OCLCnums and related ISBNs (if any). It is designed to be easily built in to your library application, so you can expand queries, find all related editions, or do whatever creative thing you want to do.

Background:
ISBNs have been assigned since 1970, to most but not all books published.

OCLC numbers are assigned whenever a record is added to WorldCat, OCLC's global union catalog. These records cover a large portion of all books, old and new, held by any library in North America and, increasingly other regions worldwide (most recently, National Library of China).

So the coverage range of OCLC numbers is, not surprisingly, far greater than that of ISBNs: in WorldCat, for example, around 100 million OCLCnums compared to about 20 million ISBNs.

More Information on xOCLCnum
xOCLCnum API description

1:30 Ratio for Information

The post at Librarian.net about the book containing thirty tables-of-contents reminded me of the 1:30 rule for information.
Dolby and Resnikoff found these relationships:

• A book title is 1/30 the length of a table of contents in characters, on average
• A table of contents is 1/30 the length of a back of the book index, on average
• A back of the book index is 1/30 the length of the text of a book, on average
• An abstract is 1/30 the length of the technical paper it represents, on average

Is this the result of living in the material world and this won't hold true online? Or is this a function of the brain and how it deals with information and likely to hold true where ever we function?

XML Workshop

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of taking the XML workshop offered by Eric Lease Morgan. One of the best workshops I've experienced. Now the notes have been revised and are available online.

XML is about distributing data and information unambiguously. Through this hands-on workshop you will learn: 1) what XML is, and 2) how it can be used to build library collections and faciliate library services in our globally networked environment.

• An introduction to XML
• Activity - Beyond MARC
• Indexes make search easier
• Activity - Indexing/searching MODS
• Activity - Writing XML
• Flavors of XML
• Activity - Writing XML, redux
• Activity - Full-text indexes
• Client/server computing
• Databases for data storage and maintenance
• OAI-PMH - a de-centralized OCLC
• Activity - Being an OAI service provider
• Activity - Being an OAI data repository
• Web Services
• Activity - Creating a "mash-up"
• Workshop summary
• External links