RE: Back to identifiers

Note that a WorldCat.org URI is not a number. The Linked Data 303 (See
Other) redirect is important because the 1st URI identifies "the thing"
and the second identifies "a description of the thing" (what Corey call
"a record"). Both can have the same legacy number in them without
causing ambiguity.

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karen Coyle [mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net]
> Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 12:36 PM
> To: Wallis,Richard
> Cc: Corey Harper; public-schemabibex@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Back to identifiers
> 
> 
> 
> On 1/18/13 8:58 AM, Richard Wallis wrote:
> 
> >> For practical reasons, I don't support the notion that an OCLC # or
> >> an LCCN are strictly identifiers for a book.
> >
> > Neither do I
> >>
> 
> Well, that's news to me, because when I suggested this to you, you
came
> back with (and I quoted this before):
> 
> "The ISBN is a string of characters (in ISBN scheme that Bowkers
> administer) that they have issued to represent the book - it is not
the
> book.
> 
> The WorldCat URI identifies the Book."
> 
> And in another post:
> 
> ***
> URIs are about providing dereferencable identifiers for 'things'.
> 
> So when for instance the British Library asserts that the URI for a
> book in the BNB is sameAs in the German National library  they are
> saying the books are the same, not the records they have.
> 
> It is the same with WorldCat - it's not just a pile of records it is
> [becoming] a graph (to use the current label) of relationships between
> things - people, places, organisations, concepts, and bibliographic
> works.
> 
> The URIs represent the things not the records that are being mined to
> build descriptions of those things.
> 
> ***
> 
> You might see why I have been confused.
> 
> Here's my take:
> 
> Because of how we have done things in the past, we have identifiers
for
> records that describe some level of bibliographic item. De facto, we
> have also used those identifiers for the "things" they describe. I
> suspect that this is a common situation for anyone in data processing,
> and I suggest that we not agonize over it but live with the ambiguity.
> 
> And in this ambiguous world, ISBNs, LCCNs, BNB #s, OCLC#s, all work
> reasonably well to identify a creative output. They may also at times
> represent the record. That's life.
> 
> So, back to identifiers (and I do NOT want this wrapped up in the
> discussion about SKOS because I DO NOT see SKOS:concept as valid for
an
> identifier), I think our identifier proposal should be for identifiers
> that are not in URI format. full stop.
> 
> kc
> 
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>

Received on Friday, 18 January 2013 17:44:17 UTC