Holdings - was Re: Some additions to wiki

Hi Karen,

Holdings is a difficult one. I have trouble in justifying, in data modelling
terms, its existence as an an entity. Here is most of an email, in another
thread I am in, on the subject.

> I still remain to be convinced that a Holding is a thing to be modelled as an
> entity in its own right.
> 
> Surely the realisation of a holding is just the relationship between a thing
> (Book, Journal, License to access) and a location (Shelf, Library,
> Institution).  Its not a thing or a concept.
> 
> Schema, which would probably best describe an item the union between a
> CreativeWork and a Product.  The SomeProducts[1] subtype of Product has the
> inventoryLevel property. That's what holdings are, a count of the number of
> items at a location.
> 
> Trying to model, the phantom echo of performance enabling RDBMS
> denormalization in to a table called Holdings, is definitely a bad idea.
> 
> My couple of cents..

I believe that those outside of the library domain have equal difficulty in
understanding too.  I know this might be a radical suggestion as holdings
have been key to water-cooler discussions in libraries for decades.
However my linked data background has taught me to model the real things in
the real world, and I am yet to meet or pick up a holding.

~Richard.



On 13/01/2013 15:02, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

> I wasn't quite sure where this went, but I added two objects to the
> object-type page [1]:
> 
> - the "library" object that is under localBusiness
> - a new "library holdings" type.
> 
> In each I put in some text about some new properties that might be needed.
> 
> I also have beefed up the commonEndeavor HTML example. [2] If you wrap
> <html> around it is does actually display, although it's not very
> attractive. Just pretend that there's some nice CSS involved that fixes
> that.
> 
> kc
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Object_Types
> [2] http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/CommonEndeavor

Received on Monday, 14 January 2013 10:07:04 UTC