Re: Holdings

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 1:14 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
> Thanks, Richard. Personally, I would switch inventoryIdentifier and
> serialNumber -- the barcode on the book is the inventory identifier. Serial
> number works just as well for either, so it could be the call number.

I still think that's the wrong way around. This is not "serial number
as in ISSN", but "serial number as in uniquely identifies a single
item". barcode is a much, much better fit for schema.org/serialNumber
in my opinion, as while we have established that some libraries use
the same call number for multiple copies of a given item, I don't
think there are any libraries that use the same barcode more than
once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_number says "A serial number (also
manufacturer's serial number or MSN) is a unique code assigned for
identification of a single unit. Although usually called a number, it
may include letters, though ending with digits. Typically serial
numbers of a production run are incremented by one, or another fixed
difference, from one unit to the next." That last bit also sounds an
awful lot like how barcodes are typically generated, and not at all
how call numbers are assigned (accession numbers, sure, but that's a
different beast).

Richard, do you have a proposed definition for
schema.org/inventoryIdentifier? I'm keen on finding out how it differs
substantially from schema.org/sku. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sku
uses the definition: "a unique identifier for each distinct product
and service that can be purchased in business"; that's pretty close to
what I would think of as an inventory identifier. If we're going to
argue for the addition of a new property, it's going to need to be
convincingly different!

> Other than that, I think this is good to go, but we never got a definitive
> answer about de-commercializing the definitions, did we? However, we also
> got only positive responses, as I recall.

Yes, there seems to be a limited attention span on public-vocabs and I
think most of that attention recently has been gobbled up by SKOS and
to a lesser extent the accessibility proposal... but like you I don't
recall any opposition to the notion. I wouldn't be surprised if
schema.org 1.0d was released and the changes were just there!

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2013 17:34:35 UTC