Re: Holdings - was Re: Some additions to wiki

I agree with Richard in that we don't need an extra entity for holding.

As I understand it, a holding is a CreativeWork that can be accessed via a library's service (loan, reading room, ILL). In other words, a holding is a resource that is part of a library collection. Thus, a decription of a holding doesn't differ much from a description of an instance in a private collection (like e.g. on LibraryThing), only to the regard that the collection or service it might be linked to belongs to an institution that is classified as a library. 

As a consequence, I think there is no need to use the term "holding" at all in our data modeling efforts. (In German, we don't have a corresponding term to "a holding" - as an individual - at all but only for the set of all the holdings of a library ('Bestand'). As even in natural languages you don't have a problem with leaving out this concept, we probably can omit this one without any problems.)

All the best
Adrian

>>> On 14.1.2013 at 11:06, Richard Wallis <richard.wallis@oclc.org> wrote: 
> 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 10:42:33 UTC