Re: A better solution for legacy IDs?

For clarification: As I understand it there are two options for dealing with legacy identifiers in RDF: 
1.) One could provide subproperties of dcterms:identifier like bibo:isbn or europeana:localIdentifier.
2.) One could mint URIs for each identifier in a specific namespace for each identifier scheme. 

(BTW, combining these approaches in one triple using dcterms:identifier or any of its subproperties isn't possible as rdfs:range of dcterms:identifier is rdfs:Literal.)

In the culturegraph project we tend to the first approach though there is no vocab for identifiers used published yet. I see a problem in the second approach (minting URIs for legacy identifiers). The question is: How would they be used? They are two ways of using these which both might make sense (in the example I use info-URIs, one could also use HTTP URIs):

a) as identifiers for the identifier (e.g. ISBN) like in: <http://lobid.org/resource/HT002948556> bibo:isbn10 <info:0915145537> , <info:0915145529> .
b) as identifiers for the bibliographic resource like in <http://lobid.org/resource/HT002948556> owl:sameAs <info:0915145537> , <info:0915145529> . 

I've already seen both approaches popping up in discussions (see [1]). Regardless of the question whether owl:sameAs is the right property to use it is clear that a problem might result if different people use the same URI in different ways. 

I think the approach of the pen citations project[2] combines both approaches in a sensible way, i.e. journals are named by urn:issn URIs and the the RDF describing a journal looks like this (see [3] for the turtle file):

<urn:issn:1556-4681> a <http://purl.org/spar/fabio/Journal>;
    prism:issn "1556-4681". 

Adrian

[1] http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/3572/xsd-or-vocabulary

[2] http://opencitations.net/

[3] http://opencitations.net/doc/?uri=urn%3Aissn%3A1556-4681&format=ttl

>>> On 11.12.2011 at 19:50, in message
<20111211105005.14406nxoc3xqte8t@kcoyle.net>, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net>
wrote: 
> I keep running into the same problem in different projects: we've got  
> a bunch of legacy identifiers, like ISBNs, PMIDs, OCLC numbers, etc.  
> It's important to carry them in the linked data that we are creating,  
> but the maintenance agencies haven't provided them with URIs. That  
> means we need to keep the base identifier string along with something  
> that, well, identifies the identifier. I know that BIBO has BIBO:ISBN,  
> etc., but it's just not going to work to create a separate property  
> for each one of these, the number of them is too large.
> 
> Has anyone developed and published a good "legacy identifier graph"  
> that we could adopt? If not, would someone like to propose one?
> 
> Thanks,
> kc

Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 13:05:46 UTC