Rob Styles and other members of the team at Talis have put together a paper on MARC, RDF and relationships in data, Semantic Marc, MARC21 and The Semantic Web. [PDF]
The article provides a concise overview of RDF and would be a good introduction for cataloguers familiar with MARC who have an interest in the semantic web.
As a non-cataloguer myself these days, the article is also a nice roundup of the current state of MARC21, and some of limitations. It is an interesting look at doing three great things: transforming, extending and reusing existing data. The amount of valuable data in MARC formats is staggering - projects such as this have potential to increase that value even more.
Most interesting to me was the discussion about authority. This is to me one of the greatest potentials and promises of the semantic web. The article proposes ways of generating URIs to deal with variants of names and titles.
In the future, the team will be comparing their output with other projects such as Bibliontology, RDF Book Mashup, and MarcOnt.
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