Re: Holdings-as-Offer: wrap-up

On 10/19/13 2:07 PM, Dan Scott wrote:

>
> Agreed. Perhaps my fault was in not publishing a complete, ideal example
> that would demonstrate branch relationships, geographic coordinates,
> contact info, addresses, etc, where each library had its own URL that
> contained that structured data so that we could link to those pages
> rather than falling back to Text values. But that would force us to
> solve all possible problems first before publishing something that
> should work for the most common use cases.
>
> I was assuming that the group would mentally fill in the gaps, similar
> to how most of the existing schema.org <http://schema.org> examples
> reflect only a subset of what is possible and ideal.

Dan, et al

Given that our proposal does not make any additions to schema.org, and 
doesn't need schema.org approval (AFAIK), we could think of it as the 
beginning of documentation for libraries/library systems wishing to 
implement schema. I think at this point that we should try some full 
examples, to make sure that our "parts" are compatible and complete.

This is somewhat difficult because I don't think we have clear use cases 
for the data. In other words, I don't think we have articulated what we 
would like from the search engines (or even if they are our primary 
target), nor do we have specific non-search engine goals. However, we do 
have existing library system displays, and could start there.

I'm aware of two primary patterns for LIS displays:
1) the search result pages, with multiple items on a page
2) the individual item pages

We should think of both linking in to systems, and linking out from them.

The first question is: do we anticipate markup of search results pages, 
or only of individual item pages? Note that the former do not always 
list the full holdings information (that depends on the system and the 
implementation) and usually have a minimal bib display. The latter *may* 
have a stable URI (and where it doesn't we just have to wait for systems 
to catch up to that, no?). It also has a fuller bib display and probably 
a full holdings list.

Then, we need to know what our target(s) are. The WorldCat RDFa has the 
WC page for the item as its target. Plugging that into the rich snippet 
tool I get:

A feast of snakes (Book, 1976) [WorldCat.org]
www.worldcat.org/oclc/2091649
The excerpt from the page will show up here. The reason we can't show 
text from your webpage is because the text depends on the query the user 
types.

The target link is for the item page. (I don't know where the rich 
snipper tool gets the properly camel-cased "WorldCat.org" though. ?) Are 
there any other options for targets? For libraries that do not have URIs 
for items, would the target be the catalog? a search URL?

The next is: do we anticipate marking up information about the library 
itself on every page? e.g. the name of the library (or consortium), the 
location(s). In my browsing of systems, lists of branches, addresses, 
and hours are part of the library web page but are not directly linked 
to the catalog. If one of our goals is to provide location services, is 
this a markup question or an ILS software question? What information 
does the ILS page provide that could be useful if marked up?





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

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2013 14:49:32 UTC