bibfra.me vocabularies

The supporting vocabularies in this respository reflect Zepheira's approach to modular, layered vocabulary management. These vocabularies are being shaped by a range of related professional services engagements along the hundreds of professional librarian participants in Zepheira's Practical Practitioner, Linked Data training series. The vocabularies evolve and work alongside our data diagnostics, transformation and enhancement services, along with the Libhub inititative to make libraries viible on the Web. The core implementation of these services is available as open source software.

Please let us be clear that these vocabularies are not intended to replace or compete with other Linked Data namespaces, for libraries or any other purpose. These vocabularies take advantage of BIBFRAME profiles, and are designed to be enhanced by layering on further profiles, perhaps to represent the needs of a particular institution, consortium or area of usage specialization. We hope that by sharing this approach, others may consider similar practices for effective vocabulary management and distributed governance, through the the flexibility of BIBFRAME.

See also: Library of Congress's BIBFRAME site

Representation

The main files of interest are in the directory model. Each one contains the vocabulary for one of the layers/profiles which can be used independently. They are in a format called Versa Literate, which is based on Markdown. Versa Literate is designed for easy reading and edit by even non-technical people. Here is a brief guide.

# @docheader

* @base: http://bibfra.me/vocab/
* @property-base: http://bibfra.me/purl/versa/support
* title: Lite version of BIBFRAME vocabulary

A special section serving as a document header. @base is the default base IRI, used e.g. for resource headers (see below). It would also be used for properties except that in this case it is overridden by @property-base, which specifies a base IRI for properties.

# Resource

* synonyms: http://bibframe.org/vocab/Resource http://schema.org/Thing
* label: Resource
* description: Conceptual Resource
* properties: label description image link

A section defining a resource type (analogous to an RDF class), as indicated by convention in this case by a top-level header marker (#). The List (multiple lines starting with (* then space) defines properties of the resource, or really metaproperties in this case.

## property

* description: a relationship between two resources or a resource and literal data
* label: property

A section defining a property (analogous to an RDF property), as indicated by convention in this case by a second-level header marker (##). Again the List defines metaproperties of the property.

Building RDFS files

To build RDFS use the parse_versa_model command from Versa. So for example, from the model directory of the source:

for i in $( ls *.md ); do
    echo Processing: $i
        parse_versa_model --rdfxml $i.rdfs  $i
done

This will generate one RDFS file per Versa literate (.md) file.

Note: bfevent.md is an empty file at the moment, so you'll get an error processing that one.