Developers,

 

 

A recent post in the Koha discussion list about MODS support reminded me of something I’d be thinking of for a while.  I’ve heard of talk of developing Koha to support other standards that MARC, such as DC, MODS or METS.  It certainly would be nice to be able to use whichever schema best fit ones collection, and to be able to mix different types of standards together into a common interface and management system.  I suppose one of the major difficulties would be finding a way to map all those different standards to a relational database, without exploding the number of tables and complexity.

 

So, the thought occurred to me: since most of these formats are already in XML (or could be mapped to it easily enough), why not use a Native XML Database?  This would save on mappings, since XQuery would be used to extract information directly from the XML.  It would also be flexible enough to allow for home-grown Schemas to be mixed in with standards.  There would also be one less translation in getting the information out of storage and into an AJAX interface.

 

The one major concern I see (aside from all the re-coding) is speed.  Could a Native XML Database, with the proper indexes, perform as quickly as Koha does now with MySQL and Zebra? And is there any way to answer that without doing the re-coding?

 

I just thought I’d throw this out as food for thought, and hopefully some discussion. I don’t know if this has been mentioned before (couldn’t find it in the email archives), but it could prove to be worth looking at.

 

Cheers,

 

 

Ian Walls

Systems Integration Librarian

NYU Health Sciences Libraries

(212) 263-8687

 

 




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