Running Header: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 1

A Comparative Analysis:

BIBFRAME & Schema.org

Crystal Stephenson

University of South Florida

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 2

“A Comparative Analysis: BIBFRAME & Schema.org”

In recent years, the Bibliographic Framework, or BIBFRAME, has emerged as a

“framework developed under the auspices of the Library of Congress to exert bibliographic

control over traditional and web resources in an increasingly digital world.” (Tharani, 2015)

Slated to replace the outdated Machine-Readable Cataloging format, or MARC, used for the

dissemination of bibliographic data, BIBFRAME endeavors “to evolve bibliographic information

standards to a linked data model, in order to make bibliographic information more useful both

within and outside the library community.” (Taniguchi, 2017) Meanwhile, Schema.org launched

with the objective to “allow Web publishers a means to express rich metadata” and improve

search engine retrieval in the “evolution towards the data Web.” (Miller et al., 2012) In 2012, the

OCLC “produced an experimental Schema.org-compatible representation of WorldCat,” which

highlights their overlapping goals in linked data initiatives. While the foundation of Schema.org

is not specifically “aligned with the objectives of the Library community, the potential impact

this work may have on the library community is enormous.” The aim of this paper is to review

and compare the BIBFRAME and Schema.org models of information organization, concluding

with a brief analysis of the Library of Congress and, according to the published research, why

they might remain committed to the BIBFRAME model over that of the Schema.org framework.
Launched in 2011, BIBFRAME is a data model lauded as “the foundation for the future

of bibliographic description that happens on the web and in the networked world.” (Taniguchi,

2017) The Library of Congress commissioned a data management company, Zepheira, to

develop BIBFRAME, projecting it to replace the MARC standards of description created in the

1960s. BIBFRAME is a conceptual model that serves to aid in understanding a complex

metadata schema and perspectives on a specified topic of a resource. It was developed to

“translate bibliographic data to a linked data model while also incorporating emerging data
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standards and models including Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and

Resource Description and Access (RDA).” (Mitchell, 2013) Created to “make library records

accessible to the Web at large” and promising “to better accommodate RDA and its vocabulary

than MARC 21” (El-Sherbini, 2017), BIBFRAME was designed to “deconstruct MARC 21

records and create relationships among entities.”

While librarians created FRBR, the outsourced BIBFRAME was introduced for

simplification of group entities with the intent of being more user-friendly, and coded to define

classes, instances, and properties of a resource. The BIBFRAME model is expressed in RDF,

consisting of three main classes of abstraction, including Work, Instance, and Item, with the

addition of the three key concepts of Agent, Subject, and Event, in relation to the core entities.

Work “identifies the conceptual essence of something” (El-Sherbini, 2017), while the Instance

“reflects the material embodiment of a Work” and Item being the actual copy of it. Agents are

defined as the “people, organizations, jurisdictions, etc., that are associated with a Work or

Instance through roles such as” authorship, and Subjects identify the concepts, including topics,

places, or events, the latter being occurrences, “the recording of which may be the content of a

Work.”
In short, the “FRBR recognizes entities, attributes and relationships between entities like

web resources” (Hallo et al., 2016), while BIBFRAME “is defined in RDF, identifying all

entities (resources), attributes and relationships between entities (properties).” Furthermore,

BIBFRAME “enables the use of annotations such as mapping to other vocabularies” like Dublin

Core, resulting in improved catalog retrieval. In an effort to simplify or streamline the FRBR

entity-relationship model, BIBFRAME’s Work entity is somewhat “analogous to the FRBR’s

work concept,” but essentially marries both the Work and Expression of FRBR, while
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BIBFRAME’s Instance entity “can roughly be described as a conflation between Expression and

Manifestation.” (Mitchell, 2013)

“A key to increasing the relevance of libraries to information seekers is to increase the

open web visibility of the resources they offer their patrons” (Pesch & Miller, 2016), since most

people “start their quests for knowledge in the web instead of going to a physical site or custom

library or information provider website.” With this rationale in mind, it is natural to see why the

MARC standard for describing materials employed by librarians is outdated, since it was

developed decades before the web. “Generic tools used for discovering information on the web

were not designed to ingest and index MARC readily, so library content is not visible in the

search engines users use to find information on the web.” BIBFRAME was not the only

conceptual model to identify this disconnect and adapt to the times, however. Schema.org was

founded by the world’s top search engines, Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, with the

belief that a “shared vocabulary makes it easier for webmasters and developers to decide a

schema and get maximum benefit for their efforts.” (Scheme.org, 2018) Schema.org is a

“collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for

structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.” The vocabulary

can essentially be used in a variety of encodings, including RDFa and JSON-LD, covering

“entities, relationships between entities and actions, and can easily be extended through a well-

documented extension model.”

Schema.org’s initiative provides a “core ontology for search engines to normalize the

markup of webpages in a way that reduces ambiguity about what the pages are describing and

makes the integration of the data into search engines more efficient.” (Fons et al., 2012) OCLC

took notice of the developments in the search engine industry and “realized that it could be an

important tool to more effectively represent the collective collections of libraries on the Open
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Web.” And since 2011, “OCLC researchers have been experimenting with Schema.org as a

vehicle for exposing library metadata to Web search engines in a format they seek and

understand.” (Godby et al., 2015) Their efforts “led to the 2012 publication of Schema.org

metadata elements expressed as linked data on 300 million catalog records accessible from

WorldCat.org.” In other words, it would appear that Schema.org has become “an ideal tool to

mediate” the complexity between a web user’s search and the content to be delivered, and “more

efficiently connect end users to the content they desire” (Fons et al., 2012).
While it is possible that both models, BIBFRAME and Schema.org, can be

complimentary, the “coverage of Schema.org is necessarily broad but shallow because library

resources must compete with creative works offered by many other communities in the

information landscape.” (Godby et al., 2015) In comparison, the coverage of BIBFRAME “is

deep because it contains the vocabulary required of the next-generation standard for describing

library collections.” Similarities do exist, “particularly in the definition of entities such as Work,

Instance, Organization, and Person.” But the linked data models being developed by OCLC

“optimize descriptions of library resources for discovery on the Web beyond libraries, using the

vocabulary designed for consumption by general-purpose search engines.” Likewise, the broad

vocabulary defined by Schema.org serves the greater information-seeking public, but “may not

include many of the details defined by BIBFRAME, which aims more to address the needs of

long-term curation by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions.” (Godby et al., 2015)
When an individual begins their hunt for information “with a search engine or social

network, whose objective is to help users locate information, then cultural heritage organizations

need to help those engines and networks direct users to answers, especially those held by

libraries.” (Miller et al., 2012) The BIBFRAME model is specifically designed to meet these

standards head on, by coordinating “the cataloging and metadata that libraries create with these
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 6

efforts, and connect them.” The BIBFRAME model is therefore “the library community’s formal

entry point for becoming part of a much larger web of data.”

One may ask why the Library of Congress has not simply adopted the Schema.org model

with appropriate alterations and extensions to the existing vocabulary for cataloging purposes.

However, OCLC is still in their experimental phase, so the research is inconclusive at present,

but as previously mentioned, Schema.org is very broad in scope and formatted to make “it easier

for search engines to specialize the way pages are listed” (Pesch & Miller, 2016), but have “less

to do with the actual surfacing of otherwise hidden resources,” which is the goal of

BIBFRAME’s development. BIBFRAME affords the Library of Congress the “richness and

flexibility required for catalogers and archivists, but also renders the described resource to be

machine- and web-readable.” This is an ideal framework that encompasses the necessities of

linked data principles, practices, and technologies, in order to stay above the curve, while also

working “as a bridge between the description component and open web discovery.” BIBFRAME

descriptions are also more “detailed because they include the specialized vocabulary required for

professional curation” (Godby et al., 2015). Their “focus on vocabulary development to support

upgraded machine-understandable descriptions of the resources uniquely held by libraries” sets

this model apart from Schema.org, which “can refer to this description and enhance its own

simply by adding a ‘same as’ assertion containing the BIBFRAME URI.” But it should be noted

that, “to generate comparable descriptions or to pass them through OCLC’s data processing

stream without loss of information,” Schema.org must “use the BIBFRAME vocabulary

directly.” BIBFRAME supplies a “depth of description” that may always be missing from similar

data models optimized for discovery. For instance, a map can be defined as a resource in

Schema.org, “but the list of defined properties is too sketchy to meet the stewardship needs of

librarianship” as of yet.
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Libraries must be flexible, responsive, and “serve their users in exciting new ways” (Xu

et al., 2017), or those who “cling to outdated standards,” like MARC, “will find it increasingly

difficult to serve their clients as they expect or deserve.” As one study opined, “there remains a

widespread perception that continued adherence to MARC is causing libraries to fall behind the

technological curve and to miss out on collaborative opportunities with other metadata

communities.” BIBFRAME and Schema.org have emerged as prominent figures in the

discussion of linked data, and while they share many similarities, there remains enough

differentiation to question the convergence of these frameworks, particularly in the authoritative

case of the Library of Congress. More research is required and experimentation necessary before

a determination can be made as to whether the Library of Congress should consider integrating a

Schema.org model. But while the debate forges on, it is clear that the shift towards linked data is

most advantageous in our ever-increasing digital age. To be certain, we “are beginning to see the

recognition of metadata as crucial in this world where the web gives us much of our

information.” (Dull, 2016) As such, librarians have long feared their jobs would become obsolete

in the shadow of Google, but quite the contrary, as they are more relevant now than ever, “given

their skills in creating and managing metadata and the need to make these rich resources

accessible” to all.

References

Dull, M. E. (2016). Moving Metadata Forward with BIBFRAME: An Interview with Rebecca
Guenther. Serials Review, 42(1), 65. doi:10.1080/00987913.2016.1141032
El-Sherbini, M. (2018). RDA Implementation and the Emergence of BIBFRAME. JLIS.It,
Italian Journal Of Library, Archives & Information Science, 9(1), 66-82.
Fons, T., Penka, J., & Wallis, R. (2012). OCLC’s Linked Data Initiative: Using Schema.org to
A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 8

Make Library Data Relevant on the Web. Information Standards Quarterly. Vol. 24, Issue

2/3. ISSN 1041-0031.

Godby, C., & Denenberg, R. (2015) Common Ground: Exploring Compatibilities Between the
Linked Data Models of the Library of Congress and OCLC. Dublin, Ohio: Library of

Congress and OCLC Research. Retrieved July 19, 2018, from

https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-loc-linked-

data-2015.pdf.
Hallo, M., Luján-Mora, S., Maté, A., & Trujillo, J. (2016). Current State of Linked Data in
Digital Libraries. Journal Of Information Science, 42(2), 117.

doi:10.1177/0165551515594729
Miller, E., Ogbuji, U., Mueller, V., & MacDougall, K. (2012). Bibliographic Framework as a
Web of Data: Linked Data Model and Supporting Services (PDF) (Report). Library of

Congress. Retrieved July 19, 2018, from http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/pdf/marcld-report-

11-21-2012.pdf.
Mitchell, E. T. (2013). Three Case Studies in Linked Open Data. Library Technology
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Problems: An Interview with Eric Miller of Zepheira. Serials Librarian, 71(1), 1.

doi:10.1080/0361526X.2016.1183159
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Schema. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 55(6), 387.

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Tharani, K. (2015). Linked Data in Libraries: A Case Study of Harvesting and Sharing
Bibliographic Metadata with BIBFRAME. Information Technology & Libraries, 34(1), 5-

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