Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

In message <20101031170135.8e8hxcb0g4gc4cwk@kcoyle.net>, Karen Coyle 
<kcoyle@kcoyle.net> writes

>Dan, this is one of those areas where the library cataloging view is
>very particular but also very different from the SemWeb view. First, I
>suggest taking a look at the diagrams that Gordon pointed us to:
>
>http://www.gordondunsire.com/pubs/docs/frdiagrams.pdf

I don't understand the reasoning (on page 7) behind putting Name and 
Identifier into a single box. Is that saying that each Name has a 
corresponding Identifier?  To me, names and identifiers are independent 
of each other, and have different properties and purposes.

>You will see there that names of things are first class objects in the
>library world. The reasons for this are historical (not hysterical):
>In past technologies, what libraries mainly aimed to do with names was
>to create an identity; and an identity for the bibliographic entity is
>the name. (The name of a Person, a Corporate body, but also of a Work
>or a Manifestation -- the latter called 'titles' but still with the
>role of identification.)

Maybe it's not so different.  Another way of looking at this is to say 
that the library world has been doing for decades what the Linked Data 
initiative is now trying to do - creating identities which are unique 
and hopefully both shared and persistent within a given community - just 
using a different mechanism.  Creating an identity for an author, e.g. 
by adding birth and death dates to their name, is a slightly artificial 
exercise with exactly the same purpose as minting a LD URL for that 
author.  Two differences between this technique and the LD approach are 
that:

  - it won't scale up to identify all people uniquely
  - it's not dereferencable

>There is no 'things in the world' concept in library cataloging in the
>sense that there is in SemWeb. This is in part because the library
>catalog is a closed environment where all references are to other
>things in the library catalog (or potentially in the library catalog).
>Creating a mind meld between this model and the SemWeb model is going
>to take some fancy footwork.

Why try?  The current VIAF approach for authors, as I understand it, is 
to publish the bibliographic authority data, and then alongside it 
publish FOAF etc. views of the same person.  At least that's what I 
think I get when I ask for:

http://viaf.org/viaf/102333412/rdf.xml

[currently down for maintenance].  It certainly isn't a good idea to 
compromise your core data model.

Richard
-- 
Richard Light

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 09:43:42 UTC