Re: [METADATA] Governance/authority (ISSUE-2)

Yes, it¡¯s odd that ebook systems can¡¯t seem to ignore the leading article
when the retailers who develop these systems mastered that some 14 years
ago. Indicates a bifurcation in product management teams.

These are all terrific suggestions; and I agree that metadata is one of
those topics that takes two forms: the simplistically reduced and the
deeply complex. Somehow we¡¯ll have to muddle through. :)

On 9/15/14, 7:15 PM, "Liam R E Quin" <liam@w3.org> wrote:

>On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 18:11:39 -0400
>LAURA DAWSON <ljndawson@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes, and I wouldn©öt expect the retail sites to change that. How they
>> ingest data and express it on their sites is at the core of the value
>>each
>> retailer brings to the table
>
>+1
>
>> Page count is another one of those troublesome fields. :)
>
>I have my trusty copy of McKerrow on hand for bibliography and citing
>collations :-)
>
>But you are right.
>
>Clearly metadata for ebooks (and for Web sites that may be used offline)
>has several properties that are needed... some likely examples:
>
>* mixture of embeddable metadata (title, author, category/facets),
>  updatable metadata (price, latest edition...) and
>  pointers to remotely updatable metadata (BCIP, OCLC, Amazon category
>names).
>
>* Retraction (e.g. ability for publisher to correct errors, or when a
>category
>  is split so that Shelf Zero now has occult and computing separately
>instead of
>  intermixed (real example!)
>
>* Marking of every item with source and date - e.g., according to Allen &
>Unwin
>  colume 3 of Lord of the Rings goes in Adult Fiction, as of
>such-and-such a date;
>  if you extract single "triples" and use them out of context you're
>asking for
>  a mess.
>
>* Handling complex "fields" - e.g. book or journal titles in mathematics
>  often contain formul©¡; in the humanities you'll get titles with
>fragments from multiple languages (Nielsen and other metadata
>organizations notwithstanding). The "CDATA excaping" mechanism for this
>is lunacy.
>
>* User-supplied metadata (e.g. "this book is really about computers, not
>the occult,
>  and that's where I want it on my virtual shelf" or "sort this book
>under "R" for
>  "Really Hard", not under "M" for "McKerrow"... although the ebook
>systems I've
>  seen have enough trouble ignoring "The" when sorting titles...)
>
>Onyx seems to be (1) complex enough to handle these cases, with work in
>some areas perhaps, and (2) complex enough to make a lot of people run
>screaming. But then, try going to the middle of your friendly reference
>library and saying, "can anyone help me, I want to have a friendly chat
>about MARC records" :-) and one has to remember that, just as XML tends
>to be used at the boundary between the "world" and the computer, metadata
>is used by people who are metadata experts but not necessarily computer
>experts.
>
>
>-- 
>Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
>Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2014 11:25:00 UTC