Re: vocabs, metadata set, datasets

Thanks Tom,

Have incorporated your suggestions almost literally.

Should we ask Gordon to draft an entry on Records?

Mark.

On 17/01/2011 21:24, Thomas Baker wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 10:06:34AM -0800, Karen Coyle wrote:
>>> It works well enough for drawing an analogy, but I wouldn't
>>> want to paper over the problem, especially the bit about
>>> records being about "one entity (e.g. a book)" -- which is
>>> in my opinion simply wrong because a typical catalog record,
>>> for example, contains descriptive elements not just about a
>>> book, but its author, publisher, etc.
>>
>> I think we've gone into the "focus" area again here. A library
>> record is designed to provide a complete enough description of a
>> book (or piece of music, or map, etc.) to fulfill two functions:
>>
>> 1) identification of a resource owned or licensed by a library
>> 2) user access to that resource
>>
>> The inclusion of related things like authors, places of publication,
>> etc. are all with the focus of the thing being cataloged, not as a
>> way to describe those related things. Authors are described in their
>> own records (name authority records), but only the identifier for
>> the author record is included in the bibliographic record. (It just
>> so happens that the identifier used today is a text string that
>> looks a whole lot like a name.) Thus FRBR and FRAD as separate views
>> of bibliographic data.
>>
>> The *wholeness* of the record is important because it represents a
>> description of the thing that is a complete description. While
>> individual statements may be usable in other contexts, the library
>> function of bibliographic description will always require a
>> particular set of statements (at a minimum). I believe we will
>> continue to call this set of statements a "record" for a fairly long
>> time.
>
> I agree with you on this, and I think it is important enough
> that we should say it clearly like this -- somewhere... maybe
> in an entry on "Records".  But it should perhaps also be
> acknowledged that the Linked Data space does not have a
> universally agreed way to express a bounded record.  This is
> a gap that DCAM, for example, tried to address.  The RDF
> community has spoken of "named graphs" for a number of years,
> but the term is still ambiguous (does it refer to quoted
> graphs? graph literals? URIs for graphs?  graph stores?).
> Standards-based support for provenance in Linked Data will
> depend on what is now referred to as "support for multiple
> graphs and graph stores".  For the glossary, we should avoid
> going into this sort of detail but this is such an important
> difference in paradigm that we should try to characterize
> the issues in a few sentences somewhere.
>
> Tom
>

Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2011 12:17:58 UTC