okrand - a MARC21 to RDF converter 

about
=====

software
--------

This tool was originally used to convert the 
National Library of New Zealand's MARC21 
catalogue to RDF. It should be sufficiently 
generic to do the task for any MARC21 file.

The conversion process loses some data. If 
you know of an RDF vocabularly that matches 
MARC21 perfectly, please contact the author.

Once converted, your 


name
----

Marc Okrand invented Klingon. MARC21 seems 
like Klingon for computers.

dependencies
============
 
okrand depends on two libraries to do its
heavy lifting:

  RDFLib <http://code.google.com/p/rdflib>
  pymarc <https://github.com/edsu/pymarc>

Both can be installed via the command line
with pip or easy_install:

   $ pip install rdflib pymarc
   $ easy_install rdflib pymarc


usage
=====

No command line usage yet. Open up a Python
interpreter and run the main function.

By example
----------


1.  You want to parse catalog.mrc in memory:

    >>> import okrand     
    >>> graph = okrand.main('catalog.mrc')

2.  You want to parse a compressed 
    catalog.mrc.gz file and store the graph
    on disk so that it can be used by RDFlib:

    >>> okrand.main('catalog.mrc', 
    ...     store_type='Sleepycat', 
    ...     store_id='my_catalog',
    ...     graph_id='my_catalog',
    ...     gzipped=True)

    Note: store_id and graph_id are arbitrary, 
    but are strongly recommended for 
    disk-based stores. 


If you would like to serialize the graph, call 
you can do so from the resulting object:

    >>> graph.serialize('mycatalog.n3', 
    ...     format='n3')


licence
======

APGL v3.