Vocabulary / Schema Definitions

Web accessibility is a fundamental design principle of MediaSpaces. Besides metadata describing the multimedia contents within mediaspaces, also the semantics of the metadata, hence vocabulary or schema definitions, must be Web accessible. Machine readability is achieved by representing such definitions in RDF/S and OWL.

OAI-PMH Vocabulary

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting defines a format required for structuring and transferring metadata between endpoints. The terms defined by this format - its XML Schema representation is available here - are not yet available in an RDF/S or OWL representation. The vocabulary available at http://www.mediaspaces.info/vocab/oai-pmh.rdf defines the OAI-PMH terms required by the current OAI2LOD server implementation. The vocabulary will evolve with future OAI2LOD releases.

Related Work

A collection of links to the work of others with relevance for MediaSpaces...

Wrapper tools

SPARQL access to relational databases - much work has already been done...

• D2RQ and D2R Server - probably the best solution in this area
• Squirrl RDF - also includes an LDAP mapper

Data integration / Mediation / Mapping services

Web-based solutions...

• Yahoo Pipes demonstrates very well how to design a Web-based data integration solution suitable also for non expert-users

Projects / Initatives

Others heading into the same direction...

• LinkingOpenData is a very promising W3C initative. Within a short period of time, lots of people have started to expose data sources on the Web.

Input for the list above is always welcome.