Metadata Authority Description Schema

Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) is an XML schema developed by the United States Library of Congress' Network Development and Standards Office that provides an authority element set to complement the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS).[1]

History
  • April 2004: Preliminary version for review
  • December 2004: Draft for review
  • April 2005: Version 1.0 published

MADS/RDF

MADS was originally formulated as an XML schema, but it also has an expression in Resource Description Framework (RDF), called MADS/RDF. MADS/RDF expresses and makes statements about Authorities and their Variants, which are controlled records, and distinguishes these from the real-world objects (RWOs) they describe.[2]

The Library of Congress had been representing bibliographic authority data in Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) since 2009. However, they found that they couldn’t present the full structure of authorities such as the LC Subject Headings (LCSH) in a general-purpose form such as SKOS. MADS/RDF is intended to complement SKOS: its classes and properties are subclasses of appropriate SKOS items. For example, madsrdf:Authority is a sub-class of skos:Concept, and madsrdf:authoritativeLabel is a sub-property of skos:prefLabel.[2]

MADS/RDF authority items use both authoritativeLabels, which are structured strings like "United States--New Jersey--Essex--Montclair", and collections of typed nodes such as {Country, State, County, City}.[2]

Further reading
  • Sally McCallum, Library of Congress. "MADS, a MODS Companion".

References
  1. Mark Needleman (March 2005). "Standards Update: Some Interesting XML Standards". Serials Review. 31 (1): 70–71. doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2004.11.012.
  2. "MADS/RDF Primer". Library of Congress Standards. USA Library of Congress. 2015.
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