Interoperability Between Schema.org and RDA for Describing Bibliographic Entities

This study investigates the interoperability between Schema.org and Resource Description and Access (RDA) as complementary standards for describing bibliographic entities. The research problem arises from Schema.org’s limitation in supporting context-dependent value assignment. RDA, as a content standard, is a promising candidate for bridging this gap, especially within the bibliographic context. Integrating these standards presents an opportunity to enhance bibliographic descriptions by combining the web discoverability of Schema.org with the contextual depth offered by RDA. However, realizing this opportunity requires investigating the alignment between specific components of these standards. Adopting an applied approach, this study employed qualitative content analysis to examine potential alignments of Schema.org properties with RDA guidelines, instructions, and vocabulary encoding schemes (VESs) for describing bibliographic entities. The analytical procedures primarily involved mapping samples of these components based on their predefined semantic specifications. The results delineate specific points of interface between the standards, offering key insights into their interoperability in the context of bibliographic entity description. Additionally, prototype implementations are presented to demonstrate practical methods for integrating these standards within real-world metadata management workflows.