Re: A better solution for legacy IDs?

Adrian, thank you for providing a clearer statement of the problem!

What remains, though, is how to scale the solution. For example,  
presuming that libraries begin to export some bibliographic data in  
RDF, it will be necessary to provide an identifier for each resource.  
One easy solution is to use the existing database record id. The  
practice in US libraries is to prepend the standard institutional  
identifier to the database record id to create a unique identifier:
   (CaSfIAP)1234567
That could be simply a value of dcterms:identifier since there is a  
known practice, but I'm not sure this is enough information for this  
identifier as it travels outside of "library space." Eventually the  
MARC institution codes will probably each have a URI, but until  
then.... Plus there are many other such identifiers that don't have a  
standard practice like we have in libraries.

kc

Quoting Adrian Pohl <pohl@hbz-nrw.de>:

> 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
>
>
>
>



-- 
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 14:31:10 UTC