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Formats

Open data

MARC-XML

Standard bibliographic record format as used in the Central Alma catalog, in XML syntax.

See specifications on the official Library of Congress MARC website.

Dublin Core

Standard general record format, widely used for heritage data, in 2 forms:

  • DC Elements (or Unqualified, Simple)
  • DC Terms (of Qualified)

See the Dublincore website.

For the data from the Central Alma Catalog via downloads and OAI harvesting, Unqualified Dublin Core (DC Elements) is used, based on the standard MARC-DC mapping of the Library of Congress

Linked Data / RDF

Resource Description Framework, a general format for linked data, consisting of 'triples'.

See https://www.w3.org/RDF/

Many different linked data formats, or 'ontologies', can be represented in RDF. There are also different syntax forms such as RDF / XML, Turtle, N3, JSON-LD, etc.

For the data from the Central Alma Catalog, a proprietary RDF format is used, based on EDM (Europeana Data Model), in which Qualified Dublin Core (Dublin Core Terms) plays a central role in describing the collection objects. The MARC data from the Central Catalog is converted to DC according to a mapping based on the official Library of Congress 'MARC to Dublin Core Crosswalk', with some adjustments.