Re: Back to identifiers

Yes, Jeff, it's fair to ask. So I checked with the International ISBN Agency, which is the Registration Authority for the ISBN standard (and which happens to be based in the next office to me...)

ISO is the International Organization for Standardization and this body is responsible for developing and publishing thousands of international standards in all fields of work and life. In practice, international standards are developed by a panel of experts within an ISO-convened technical committee. Once a draft has been developed, it is shared and voted on by ISO’s national member bodies. For example in the US this body is ANSI. International standards are considered documents that pass through a number of different stages on their way to consensus and publication – it typically takes between 2 and 4 years, though it can be much longer.

Each international standard must have a defined scope. ISBN (International Standard Book Number) has a scope that includes books (not serials or music scores) and certain types of related products that are available to the public. Since it is intended to be an identifier for the supply chain, there has always tended to be a high level of flexibility to allow educational products in a variety of formats to qualify for ISBN, since they often flow through the same supply chain. Hence, flash reading cards and educational software has been included within ISBN scope, though games are not. Similarly audio books were included in scope because the standard states that the format in which content is delivered is irrelevant – thus the text could be audible and qualify to receive an ISBN. A feature film presentation would not qualify though.

ISBN was first developed in the late 1960s, and was the first kid on the block in terms of a supply chain identifier for the book world – and as such it was quickly and very widely adopted. Over time, and as ISBN was globally accepted, the need for other more specialised identifiers in other parts of the media space has been recognised. So for example, ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), ISMN (International Standard Music Number) ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) have been introduced. It is also a fundamental tenet of international standards developed by ISO that a particular identifier should not be used when another, more appropriate identifier designed for that purpose is available – thus don’t assign an ISBN to a music score because an ISMN should be used instead. So while the scope of ISBN has grown to encompass many items that flow through the books supply chain, it has to be clearly differentiated from the other ISO identifier standards.

In addition there are other types of standard identifier – such as the GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) developed by GS1 (www.gs1.org<http://www.gs1.org/>). GTINs can be used to identify ANY item that can be ordered, priced or invoiced in the supply chain. There are different types of GTIN (8, 12, 13 or 14 digits) but essentially the common factor that they share is that they are unrestricted in scope. (ISBN is in effect a restricted sub-scope of GTIN-13, as is ISMN.)

The ISBN standard is currently in its 4th edition since it was first adopted in 1972 by ISO. Each new edition has brought new developments and extensions in scope as the market for books has developed. Further changes in scope would be considered provided they were in keeping with the broad purpose of ISBN (i.e. to identify textual monographic publications and certain related products that are available to the public) and that they did not conflict with other existing (or soon to be existing) identifier standards.

And finally, there have been questions about expressing ISBNs as URIs. First, remember that ISBNs somewhat predate the Internet. They do have a URN representation, but obviously that is not resolvable. There is also the ISBN-A – which is in fact a variety of DOI. This does allow you to represent some ISBNs using a http URI, and resolution of that URI can lead to metadata about the book. However, the ISBN-A is not yet widely used: it's confined largely to Italy and Germany, and someone has to register the ISBN-A (separately from assigning the ISBN itself) and maintain the resolution data. There's no 'global' ISBN-A system since – ultimately – there is no central database of all the ISBNs that have been assigned. Registration is managed by 160 or so national agencies, like Bowker in the USA, who individually retain the metadata provided by publishers for each assigned ISBN.

Graham




Graham Bell

EDItEUR

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 21 Jan 2013, at 22:26, Young,Jeff (OR) wrote:

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<mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net>
Cc: Young,Jeff (OR); public-schemabibex@w3.org<mailto: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<mailto: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<http://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<mailto: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<http://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<mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net> Cc: Young,Jeff (OR);
public-schemabibex@w3.org<mailto: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<http://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<mailto: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<http://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<mailto: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<mailto:kcoyle@kcoyle.net>http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype:
kcoylenet

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

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

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