Re: Comments on "The OAI2LOD Server: Exposing OAI-PMH Metadata as Linked Data"

On Sun, Apr 27, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

...

>  >> But we should not lose sight of the fact there are a lot of other things
>  >> to be identified in an OAI repository. Having URIs for people, in
>  > particular,
>  >> is crucial. As far as I can see, the ability to uniquely identify an
>  >> author and editor has not been a strong issue in the OAI community, and
>  > we need
>  >> to encourage it.
>  > That's not fair. Name authorities are a big concern for librarians and
>  > 'repositarians', it's just that they have in general lacked a technical
>  > infrastructure for dealing with name<->id translation. And in a
>  > predominately google age that lacks LD services, little in the way of
>  > technology push for implementing them.
>  OK, agreed. Put it your way.

I wouldn't be so quick to diplomatically brush this aside. The library
world is finally taking steps into the semantic web [1], but there's
still a lot of work to do here, and making name authorities suitable
for the 21st century has to be a big one.

Bruce

[1] see Ed Summers' really excellent new work on converting LoC
subject headings into linked data <http://lcsh.info>.