XNAL: A Global Standard for Names?
Richard Lennox is working on an RDF representation of bibliographic data, and posted a comment on something I’d not run into before: XNAL. Apparently the OASIS group responsible for the standard are working on an RDF representation as well.
XNAL is indeed interesting, in part because it tackles name structures somewhat differently than the orthodoxy would suggest (see example below). For example, it has elements for first, last and middle names, which are typically seen as very Western (even U.S.) centric. But the standard allows attribute-level coding of data such as family and given names, abbreviations, etc. Hmm … wonder what the FOAF people – who have a proposal to revamp name support – think about this.
update: I just looked at the schema. One big problem here is that the name type values are just free text. That strikes me as a very bad idea.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xNL xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:ciq:xsdschema:xNL:2.0"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="urn:oasis:names:tc:ciq:xsdschema:xNL:2.0 xNL.xsd">
<NameDetails PartyType="Person">
<PersonName>
<Title>Mr</Title>
<FirstName Type="GivenName">Ram</FirstName>
<MiddleName>Laxhman</MiddleName>
<MiddleName Type="Initial">B</MiddleName>
<LastName NameType="SurName">Kumar</LastName>
<Alias>Ram</Alias>
<FormerName>
<NameLine>Ramkumar</NameLine>
</FormerName>
</PersonName>
<DependencyName PartyType="Person" DependencyType="C/O">
<PersonName>
<Title>Mr</Title>
<FirstName Type="Official" NameType="GivenName">
Venkat</FirstName>
<FirstName Type="Unofficial" NameType="GivenName">
Venki</FirstName>
<LastName>Krishnan</LastName>
</PersonName>
</DependencyName>
</NameDetails>
<NameDetails PartyType="Person">
<PersonName>
<Title>Mrs</Title>
<FirstName>S</FirstName>
<MiddleName>Devi</MiddleName>
<LastName>Sadasivan</LastName>
<Alias>Baby</Alias>
</PersonName>
<DependencyName PartyType="Organisation">
<OrganisationNameDetails>
<OrganisationName NameType="New Name">NRMA ASSET MANAGEMENT</OrganisationName>
<OrganisationName NameType="Formerly">NRMA INVESTMENTS</OrganisationName>
</OrganisationNameDetails>
</DependencyName>
</NameDetails>
<NameDetails PartyType="Person">
<NameLine>Ram Kumar</NameLine>
<DependencyName PartyType="Organisation">
<NameLine>C/O MasterSoft International Pty. Ltd</NameLine>
</DependencyName>
</NameDetails>
</xNL>
I have been looking further into xNAL and find that it is quite difficult to model in RDF. Having spoke to the CIQ technical commitee at OASIS. It is my understanding that they are very interested in its use as an RDF schema. But looking at it, the use of attributes is very difficult to utilise in RDF. As far as I understand in order to give an attribute to a relationship it would have to be parsed as a Resource which would make any RDF usage on a bibliography scale quite tedious to create by hand. Does anyone have any suggestions?
I dunno, I still think you should look closely at the proposal to revamp name representation in FOAF and see if you can contribute to getting that in proper shape for bilbiographic metadata. As I said in the post, I have some serious reservations about xNAL, and I believe the FOAF people are committed to addressing some of the same issues. Since they already have a concept of authorship (foaf:maker) and documents (foaf:document), it seems like a rather small leap.