MarcOnt

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Welcome to MarcOnt Wiki.

Contents 1 MarcOnt Initiative 2 Motivations 3 Sub-projects 4 MarcOnt Initiative - introduction

MarcOnt Initiative

MarcOnt - is a set of tools designed for collaborative ontology development. It introduces the concept of suggestions, negotiations and versioning applied to the ontology life-cycle. MarcOnt is applied in JeromeDL project helping to develop MarcOnt Ontology - the bibligoraphic ontology and mediation format. It presents the idea that the mediation information for one ontology should follow the same life-cycle pattern as the ontology itself.

Motivations

There are three main sources of motivation of the MarcOnt tools development:

• Ontology as a Social Agreement
• Backward Compatibility
• JeromeDL use case

Sub-projects

The following projects are beeing developed within MarcOnt Initiative:

• MarcOnt Portal - the main project of MarcOnt Initiative
• RDFTranslator - tool for RDF translation
• Rulegenerator - tool for development of mediation rules

MarcOnt Initiative - introduction

In the contemporary world when we visit the libraries there is no need to use librarian's cards, because most libraries are equipped librarian systems with varying functionality. Some of this systems can communicate with each other (L2L - library to library communication), so that many libraries can be searched at once for the library resources at the same time. This solution requires agreement on description and communication protocols between vendors of library systems. One of the most commonly used bibliographic description format is MARC21.

Though it is capable of describing most of the features of the library resources, its semantic content is low. It means that while searching for a resource, one has to look for particular keywords n the resource's description fields, but one cannot carry out a search be meaning or concept. This can often result in large result sets of results. Also the data communication between library systems is very hard to extend.

With the Semantic Web emerged the Dublin Core Metadata standard for library resource description. Besides the fact that most of the information covered by MARC21 is lost, the full potential of the Semantic Web is not being used. It still seems to be the best core ontology for L2L communication.

However MarcOnt ontology, is based on a social agreement that will combine descriptions from MARC21 together with DublinCore and makes use of the full potential of the Semantic Web technologies. This will include translations to/from other ontologies, better support for L2L, more efficient searching for resources (i.e. users may have impact on the searching process).

The MarcOnt initiative is strongly connected to the Jerome Digital Library project (e-library with semantics, formerly ElvisDL) - which implements a simple library ontology and can be used as a starting point for further work. MarcOnt also assumed that JeromeDL will be a testing platform for an experimental results from the MarcOnt initiative.

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