[Metadatalibrarians] VRACore4 used to describe buildings

[Theodore Gerontakos]

Donald,
I agree with Jon, VRA Core is a good choice -- I don't know of anything 
better. (I also didn't see the attachment.)

I've used VRA Core 4 to describe thousands of images of Russian buildings. 
It did a very good job of allowing us to describe our buildings. It even 
allowed us to describe building complexes using 
work/sub-work/sub-sub-work/images hierarchical structure. However this all 
gets rather complicated with recursive vra:relation attributes -- but 
having good VRA Core xml we were able to kick it all into a METS wrapper 
and use the structMap to bring it all together. We used xslt to dump VRA 
into METS.

A lot hinges (as you know) on the purpose of the data, where it's going, 
who's going to use it and how, etc. Without knowing that it's a little 
difficult to know if creating VRA Core 4 xml files is necessarily the best 
way to go; but the flexibility of that data makes it very attractive. 
Plus there's the two excellent XML Schemas -- the unrestricted version and 
the restricted version -- that you can use (or modify) to validate your 
data. Plus there's an active VRA community and a lot of VRA Core users to 
interact with. It's hard to think you can "go wrong" using this structure 
-- except that it may be more complicated than you need. I mean you're 
going to have all that xml data -- then what? Who knows how to move that 
data around, or whatever needs to be done.

We also used CCO as our content standard -- there are a few jolts between 
CCO and VRA Core but they generally worked quite well together (and were 
designed to do so I believe) -- and we used some data value standards 
(controlled vocabularies) like AAT, none causing any trouble in VRA Core.

All the areas of description you mentioned are describable using VRA Core 
4 -- and there's a lot more you can do with valid (and invalid!) VRA Core 
data to boot.

   --Theo

Theodore Gerontakos
Metadata/Cataloging Librarian
University of Washington


On Wed, 22 Apr 2009, Jon Stroop wrote:

> Donald,
> I don't think the attachment came through, but here are my thoughts--excuse 
> my post if they're too obvious.
>
> I've never done a project like this, but I think you're absolutely right to 
> go with VRA.  My primary reason is the very clear distinction it makes 
> between Materials, Techniques, and Work Type.  It seems like these map quite 
> clearly to some of the fields you list.
>
> Other reasons that come to mind:
>
>   * If you want to keep the images associated with the descriptive
>     record (as opposed, say, to via a METS) then, again, I think the
>     distinction VRA allows you to make between the work and the
>     derivative images should serve you well.
>   * If you use the restricted schema, you get a nice list of date
>     types which I imagine should cover your needs; same goes for location
>   * The granularity of the measurements element is also quite nice,
>     though encoding all the dimensions may be a bit of a big commitment.
>
> I guess the only thing I wonder is if you have any added constraints coming 
> from your content standards that don't fit well with VRA.  If not, I think 
> VRA is the way to go.
>
> -Jon
>
> Jon Stroop
> Metadata Analyst
> C-17-D2 Firestone Library
> Princeton University
> Princeton, NJ 08544
>
> Email: jstroop at princeton.edu
> Phone: (609)258-0059
> Fax: (609)258-0441
>
> http://diglib.princeton.edu
> http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead
>
>
>
> Donald Moses wrote:
>> Hello: I'm looking for advice. We would like to capture metadata about 
>> buildings and are considering using VRACore4 as a schema. 
>> The type of information we will be capturing includes: - name of the 
>> building - description of the building - type of building - it dimensions - 
>> the materials used to construct it - the architects and builders - location 
>> - associated dates (when it was built or opened and when it was destroyed) 
>> - images associated with the building 
>> Am I on the right track with using VRACore4 or should I be looking at a 
>> different metadata schema (QDC?) ? I've looked at the examples on the 
>> http://www.vraweb.org/projects/vracore4/ website and have created a sample 
>> xml file that I have attached. Advice or feedback would be appreciated. 
>> Thanks, Donald 
>> 
>> 
>>
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