The RDA Registry: supporting RDA in a multilingual world

Resource Description and Access (RDA) has taken the lead among international bibliographic standards in focusing on meeting the needs of a wide variety of language communities. The RDA Registry has been developed with those needs in mind, and is currently making it possible for speakers of French, Spanish, and other RDA Toolkit languages to do their descriptive work and build their user interfaces in the language of their users and staff. Many people think of RDA as the instructions in the Toolkit and not the Resource Description Framework (RDF) vocabularies, but in the RDA context, the RDA Vocabularies perform the function of what at one time was thought of as a ‘data dictionary’. We use the terms “element set” and “value vocabulary” in the context of RDF metadata vocabularies as defined by the Library Linked Data Incubator Group [1]. We use the term “ontology” for an RDF graph using properties that relate the components of element sets, and we use other terms such as “schema” and “standard” loosely, in the context of professional bibliographic metadata communities.