The Library of Congress has launched the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative to better accommodate future needs of the library community. A major focus of the initiative will be to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format to more Web based, Linked Data standards. Zepheira and The Library of Congress are working together to develop a Linked Data model, vocabulary and enabling tools / services for supporting this Initiative.
Cultural-heritage collections are typically indexed with metadata derived from a range of different vocabularies, such as AAT, Iconclass and in-house standards. This presents a problem when one wants to use multiple collections in an interoperable way. In general, it is unrealistic to assume unification of vocabularies. Vocabularies have been developed in many sub-domains, each with their own emphasis and scope. Still, there is significant overlap between the vocabularies used for indexing. The prime research objective of this subproject is to develop theory, methods and tools for allowing metadata interoperability through semantic links between the vocabularies. This research challenge is similar to what is called the “ontology mapping” problem in Semantic Web research.