Re: Back to identifiers

On 1/18/13 8:58 AM, Richard Wallis wrote:

>> For practical reasons, I don't support the notion that an OCLC # or an
>> LCCN are strictly identifiers for a book.
>
> Neither do I
>>

Well, that's news to me, because when I suggested this to you, you came 
back with (and I quoted this before):

"The ISBN is a string of characters (in ISBN scheme that Bowkers 
administer) that they have issued to represent the book - it is not the 
book.

The WorldCat URI identifies the Book."

And in another post:

***
URIs are about providing dereferencable identifiers for 'things'.

So when for instance the British Library asserts that the URI for a book 
in the BNB is sameAs in the German National library  they are saying the 
books are the same, not the records they have.

It is the same with WorldCat - it's not just a pile of records it is 
[becoming] a graph (to use the current label) of relationships between 
things - people, places, organisations, concepts, and bibliographic works.

The URIs represent the things not the records that are being mined to 
build descriptions of those things.

***

You might see why I have been confused.

Here's my take:

Because of how we have done things in the past, we have identifiers for 
records that describe some level of bibliographic item. De facto, we 
have also used those identifiers for the "things" they describe. I 
suspect that this is a common situation for anyone in data processing, 
and I suggest that we not agonize over it but live with the ambiguity.

And in this ambiguous world, ISBNs, LCCNs, BNB #s, OCLC#s, all work 
reasonably well to identify a creative output. They may also at times 
represent the record. That's life.

So, back to identifiers (and I do NOT want this wrapped up in the 
discussion about SKOS because I DO NOT see SKOS:concept as valid for an 
identifier), I think our identifier proposal should be for identifiers 
that are not in URI format. full stop.

kc

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Friday, 18 January 2013 17:36:53 UTC