Re: Holdings - was Re: Some additions to wiki

Richard, I agree that "holdings" is hard to model as a thing. "Name" for 
the organization is already included, as is location of the 
organization. So far there is no "location" for the individual product 
("call number" in libraries) since other businesses do not provide 
locations for individual items. In fact, there is very little item-level 
information so far in schema. Libraries will need that for call number 
(which is supposed to be unique within the library and to provide a 
single place for each book -- although this isn't followed 100% in all 
libraries), and the availability of individual items. So perhaps what we 
should model is an item level.

kc

On 1/14/13 2:06 AM, Richard Wallis 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

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

Received on Monday, 14 January 2013 13:24:02 UTC