Proposal regarding name equivalences

See attachments

-- 
========================================================
   Kevin Smathers                kevin.smathers@hp.com    
   Hewlett-Packard               kevin@ank.com            
   Palo Alto Research Lab                                 
   1501 Page Mill Rd.            650-857-4477 work        
   M/S 1135                      650-852-8186 fax         
   Palo Alto, CA 94304           510-247-1031 home        
========================================================
use "Standard::Disclaimer";
carp("This message was printed on 100% recycled bits.");

Proposal for mapping equivalence in Person records:

As shown in the attached diagram, what I propose is essentially the 
creation of a Rosetta Stone class that holds information both about
what two instances are considered equivalent, and a semantic 
approximation of why.  

Fundamentally I assume that vCard is non-canonical -- that is that 
many vCard instances may in fact reference the same individual.  I
think this is consistent with the fact that vCard does not maintain
a list of canonical forms, thus it is not a naming authority, and
thus cannot and does not behave like a naming authority.

Instead equivalence must be discovered, by mapping through some
name authority, such as the Getty Union List of Artist Names, or
the OCLC naming authority.

This model maps vCard instances to the OCLC name authority, (or more
generally any instance of any type onto any other instance), giving 
the relationship a probablyMatches when there is a phrase-match 
between the vCard data and the name authority, and a possiblyMatches
when there is only a word-match between the two.  

Using this model a library can make a policy decision to incorporate
the machine generated matches into the set of equivalences that will
be acted upon for the benefit of the catalog user, or can simply retain
them to assist librarians in building a set of corrected mappings.

To implement a policy of incorporating the machine mappings, a library
could for example use the RosettaStone instances to create an 
owl equivalence rule for any two vCards that map via the RosettaStone
probablyMatches relation to the same OCLC record.