Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS) is an
XML schema
An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constra ...
developed by the United States
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...
' Network Development and Standards Office that provides an
authority element set to complement the
Metadata Object Description Schema
The Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) is an XML-based bibliographic description schema developed by the United States Library of Congress' Network Development and Standards Office. MODS was designed as a compromise between the complexity o ...
(MODS).
History
* April 2004: Preliminary version for review
* December 2004: Draft for review
* April 2005: Version 1.0 published
* June 2011: Version 2.0 published
* September 2016: Version 2.1 published
What MADS Is
MADS does
authority control
In information science, authority control is a process that organizes information, for example in library catalogs, by using a single, distinct spelling of a name (heading) or a numeric identifier for each topic. The word ''authority'' in ''au ...
. It is a schema to define people, organizations, and geographical locations which can be involved in creating or publishing a creative work, publication, or artifact. Descriptive schemas for creative works and publications can reference MADS, with the underlying descriptive schema describing the item and referencing a MADS record which describes a creator or location. Authority control allows precise work with issues such as distinguishing multiple authors who share a name, sorting a list of books based on where each was published, and identifying all publications by scholars who are members of a specific organization or graduates of a specific college.
MADS is a schema for carrying authority control information and for describing authorities. It is not a controlled vocabulary nor a registry. It can reference controlled vocabularies or registries, such as
Virtual International Authority File (VIAF),
Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), or the
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN).
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.
The Library of Congress had been representing bibliographic authority data in
Simple Knowledge Organization System
Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a W3C recommendation designed for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary. SKOS is part of the ...
(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.
MADS/RDF authority items use both ''authoritativeLabel''s, which are structured strings like "United States--New Jersey--Essex--Montclair", and collections of typed nodes such as .
Further reading
*
References
External links
* {{official, https://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/
Bibliography file formats
Library cataloging and classification
Metadata standards