- From: Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2013 17:26:27 -0500
- To: "Graham Bell" <graham@editeur.org>, <kcoyle@kcoyle.net>
- Cc: <public-schemabibex@w3.org>, "Laura Dawson" <ljndawson@gmail.com>
- Message-ID: <52E301F960B30049ADEFBCCF1CCAEF5912B546E6@OAEXCH4SERVER.oa.oclc.org>
It seems fair to ask why ISO limited ISBNs to those types of things. Are those reasons still valid? Jeff From: Graham Bell [mailto:graham@editeur.org] Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 11:16 AM To: kcoyle@kcoyle.net Cc: Young,Jeff (OR); public-schemabibex@w3.org; Laura Dawson Subject: Re: Back to identifiers For completeness, some text from the International ISBN Agency website... and as you can see, not all of these are 'books'. Some examples of the types of publication that qualify for ISBN are: * Printed books and pamphlets * Individual chapters or sections of a publication if these are made available separately * Braille publications * Publications that are not intended by the publisher to be updated regularly or continued indefinitely * Individual articles or issues of a particular continuing resource (but not the continuing resource in its entirety) * Maps * Educational/instructional films, videos and transparencies * Audiobooks on cassette, or CD, or DVD (talking books) * Electronic publications either on physical carriers (such as machine-readable tapes, diskettes, or CD-ROMs) or on the Internet * Digitised copies of print monographic publications * Microform publications * Educational or instructional software * Mixed media publications (where the principal constituent is text-based) Graham Graham Bell EDItEUR Tel: +44 20 7503 6418 Mob: +44 7887 754958 EDItEUR Limited is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England no 2994705. Registered Office: United House, North Road, London N7 9DP, UK. Website: http://www.editeur.org On 19 Jan 2013, at 16:08, Laura Dawson wrote: It isn't, though. It's ISO's. we just administer it in the US and AUS. Sent from my iPhone On Jan 19, 2013, at 4:56 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote: On 1/18/13 7:09 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote: I agree with Kevin's recap and absolutely agree and encourage Bowker to publish (and recollect if necessary) this kind of resource as well. (Inconsistency aside, Schema.org has three different ways to encode ISBNs because they care.) My only quibble is to encourage Bowker to make this particular URI pattern "very clean" by eliminating the /books token from their URI. The reason is, unless I'm mistaken, some ISBNs (and potentially more in the future) don't identify "books". I'm not sure what you are referring to as ISBNs that don't identify books. But in any case, they could be intending to do as LC does and interpolate a level for the type of thing being described: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2006008786.html http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/ill.html I think it's best to let Bowker decide, since it's their identifier. kc I agree with the rest of Kevin's message, so it's nice to see some convergence! Jeff Generally, an ISBN will be treated like a string of characters, like so: <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38264520> schema:isbn "9780553479430" . but there may be cases where you could have something like this: <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38264520> schema:isbn "9780553479430"; schema:identifier _:b123; schema:identifier _:b456; schema:identifier _:b789; _:b123 a schema:Identifier; schema:issuedBy "Harvard UL"; schema:name "12345678". _:b456 a schema:Identifier; schema:issuedBy "Yale UL"; schema:name "asdfghj". _:b789 a schema:Identifier; schema:issuedBy "Princeton UL"; schema:name "qwerttyu". Now, whether we want to do propose this as part of a Schema extension is another matter, but the issue Karen raised is real and present in the data. And, if you're an institution like Bowker, there are two ways you can describe an identifier. As for the whole business about what an ISBN is or isn't or what it can or cannot do, well... I can see it both ways. An ISBN is an identifier. It can identify a Book. As for a URI, it's whatever the data says it is. Yours, Kevin On 01/18/2013 06:04 PM, Corey Harper wrote: I see your point, Jeff, and you're definitely correct about your use of redirects & to-the-letter adherence to all that fun range-14 stuff, though I'm getting a 301 rather than a 303 (see below)... I'm just a little wary of reusing an identifier that has a pretty specific legacy meaning as both a thing ID and a metadata ID, particularly when the primary usage seems to be the former. I suspect that's just a discomfort that I'll get over when/if the legacy meanings are slowly erased from our collective memories... :) Thanks, -Corey *** 301-ing for me... *** curl -I http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38264520 HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2013 22:59:22 GMT Server: Apache Location: /title/war-and-peace/oclc/38264520 This new location 200's w/ or without Accept headers... On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:04 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote: Corey, You're not crazy. A URI is an identifier. There is no good reason to model identifiers as both URIs and non- URI text-strings now-a-days. The latter need to carry too much context to be effective. Nevertheless, they exist in legacy systems. The mechanism that's being proposed creates a bridge from legacy string identifiers to the URI identifiers. Only systems that are coupled with the legacy forms will care about this bridge. Whether Schema.org cares enough about the past to adopt such an identifier bridge is unclear. That's why Richard suggests tabling this discussion in favor of SKOS patterns (which are effectively the same). The reason the example is weird is because you're overlooking the implications of Cool URIs for the Semantic Web. http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ The example doesn't identify OCLC metadata, it identifies a Book that OCLC has coined a URI for. The metadata entity has a different URI identifier. The 303 redirect from the former to the latter is merely a convenience mechanism. Jeff -----Original Message----- From: Corey Harper [mailto:corey.harper@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 2:42 PM To: kcoyle@kcoyle.net Cc: Young,Jeff (OR); public-schemabibex@w3.org Subject: Re: Back to identifiers Karen, et al., How is a URI not an identifier? That's what the "I" stands for, right? Am I missing something here? Why would we want two different design patterns for actionable http identifiers & text-strings as identifiers? The kinds of additional metadata one might associate with an identifier (who maintains it, when it was issued, &c) seem to apply irrespective of whether the identifier is a URI or a string of text, no? I agree that the URI for the ISBN does not *need* to be defined. But should that prevent an agency that manages library identifiers from defining it? I'm not sure I agree that this is out of scope, as this is exactly the kind of metadata libraries & related organizations provide. Now, it's out of scope for a discussion of schema.org metadata about the books themselves; that I agree with. And I also agree that it's weird that the example claims that the ISBN "identifies" some OCLC metadata. That seems wrong to me. If anything, both identifier point, though indirectly, to a book. Thanks, Corey On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:21 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote: No, a URI is a URI. The identifier property extension that we have talked about is for identifiers that are not URIs. I believe at one point we had something like: Identifier - value - source/authority Thus, the URI for the ISBN does not need to be defined using the identifier property extension. Yet the example on the identifier page is: <http://bowker.com/identifiers/isbn/9780553479430> a schema:Identifier; schema:name "9780553479430"; schema:inStandard "ISBN"; schema:issuedBy <http://viaf.org/viaf/142397918>; schema:issueDate "1997"; schema:identifies <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/38264520>. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but as long as there is a URI for the ISBN (and there always is because there is a defined URN for ISBN), then there is no need to re-describe it with the identifier extension. This description of the identifier I believe is out of scope for our work. (And looks a lot like ARK, which possibly had everything right but did not get wide-spread traction). I think we should stick to our task of finding a way to use identifiers that do not yet have URIs. If, instead, you are intending to mint URIs for those identifiers (issuedBy: above) then that is another case. This construct appears in the examples but not in the text, and I don't think we discussed that here. I think it would be over-reaching at this point in time. But what really baffles me here is that the Bowker ISBN is stated as identifying a WorldCat "thing." If anything, that would be reversed since the ISBN is assigned to the book before any library data is created. I do consider the ISBN to be *the* book identifier in our world and that perhaps our examples should look more like publishing examples than library catalog examples. kc On 1/18/13 9:52 AM, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote: I'm not sure I follow. The WorldCat URI is a URI, but it wouldn't make sense to say that its rdf:type is xyz:Identifier. Is that the concern? That's what I thought Richard was saying for awhile too, but if you look at this examples he does keep them separate. Jeff -----Original Message----- From: Karen Coyle [mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net] Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 12:48 PM To: Young,Jeff (OR) Subject: Re: Back to identifiers Worldcat URI is a URI. ISBN URI is a URI. Any problem there? kc On 1/18/13 9:42 AM, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote: 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 -- Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet -- Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet -- Karen Coyle kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet
Received on Monday, 21 January 2013 22:26:57 UTC