Re: A better solution for legacy IDs?

Quoting Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>:


>
> Can you expand on 'too large'? You can fit breathtaking amounts of data on
> a USB stick - or Web site - these days. What kind of size are we looking
> at? Is the problem admin/social (eg. Decentralization expected) or
> technical or a mix?

Dan, I didn't mean "large" in the "bytes" sense but in the sense of  
human effort to mint and maintain a unique property for each possible  
type of identifier. It just seems easier to me to have an "identifier"  
property (or graph) that is a single URI, but which takes the  
identifier as a value, along with a code giving the source/agency/etc.  
There are institution and organization codes that will probably cover  
most of the identifier-producing agencies. In non-linked data we often  
see things like "PMID:123456" or "eISSN:2344-8765". This would be the  
same, but would be an http URI. I realize that there isn't a great  
deal of overhead to minting a URI but my experience is that many folks  
will hesitate before doing so. Treating the legacy identifiers as  
values will probably get more uptake.

Admittedly, the edge cases will not be well controlled and we'll get  
some identifiers that are expressed in more than one way. That happens  
now in the pre-LD world; we'll have to live with that. But at least to  
have some agreement on a graph structure would be a step forward, IMO.

So, Tom, I think that answers your question: I'm mainly looking for a  
property/graph that will take values, but I will look more closely at  
the Freebase schema. Is it possible to add to the Freebase identifier  
hierarchy "at will"? Are there limitations on who can mint a new  
property? And for the Freebase namespaces that refer to an http URI  
elsewhere (like the LC catalog numbers), where is the connection made  
to the URI? I couldn't find that link.

Thanks,

kc

>
> Dan
>
>> Has anyone developed and published a good "legacy identifier graph" that
> we could adopt? If not, would someone like to propose one?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> kc
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
>>
>>
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 01:01:56 UTC