Making the data dictionary into a web service is an excellent idea. I hope you’ll keep us apprised of this work as it progresses. As you may know, there’s some work afoot to do something similar with RDA, which should fit very nicely into the environment you’re thinking about.

Diane

We are currently in discussions with a potential maintenance agency about converting the mappings database and making it available as a web service. The main point of the standard is as a base for protocol and schema standards rather than as a standard that any one system can implement and claim complaince. The next step should be to identify more protocols and schemas that could be mapped and any other dictionaries of data elements. I believe that DLF has one; it would be great if they could make it available.

Janifer

Thanks so much for this helpful context to the newly consolidated standard. I find the goals in your final bullet points very compelling. Do you think that the effort to accomplish those goals might be communicated fairly widely? There’s a lot of potential benefit reflected there, which sadly is difficult to realize in a closed standards environment.

Diane

The ISO Holdings Schema ISO 20775 which is also out to vote used ISO 8459 definitions, as did the Z39.50 Union Catalogue Profile (UCP) and part 4 was one of the input documents for NCIP. There is also some interest in investigating the common elements among NCIP and ISO ILL from that part of the community.

The standard includes provision for a maintenance agency that will
• revise or correct data element definitions as the need arises
• maintain a database of mappings of data elements to relevant protocol interchange and data schema standards
• add new elements and definitions as the need arises
• add new enumerated values or examples for data elements as the need arises
• publish a web site with mappings and updated elements, values and definitions