Re: Uniquely identifying series and issues

From: Dan Scott <denials@gmail.com>To: hha1@cornell.edu Cc: "public-schemabibex@w3.org" <public-schemabibex@w3.org> Sent: Monday, October 5, 2015 9:31 AM

Subject: Re: Uniquely identifying series and issues
On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 05:42:44AM +0000, hha1@cornell.edu wrote:> Hi folks,  I see the following as intro text to the "ComicIssue" schema:> "All comic issues can be uniquely identified by: the combination of the name> and volume number of the series to which the issue belongs; the issue number;> and the variant description of the issue (if any)."> > Is reliable unique identification a goal?  While you can get fairly close, it> is not possible in all cases without pulling in a lot more fields (and even> then, probably not).  Also, there's no consistent concept or description of a> "volume" among comics publishers.  I can go into more detail but only if unique> identification of either series or issues is a concern.
I thought we took that text from the proposal that you collaborated on withPeter wayyyy back as general guidance to people making use of the proposedschema, so if it's a gross over-exaggeration or causes more harm than help, wecan change or remove it.
My instinct when talking about "unique identifiers" would be to use URLs (andschema:url or schema:sameAs) whenever possible anyway, e.g.http://www.comics.org/issue/815101/ and http://www.comics.org/issue/868226/which would then (hopefully) be able to be dereferenced to provide the meat ofthe description anyway.---------------------------


That's entirely possible :-)  I do remember having those discussions with Peter but have forgotten most of the specifics.  I suspect something got lost in translation around the term "volume" somewhere along the way.  In the GCD that's a very specific term- it has to refer to some sort of number or other designation that is on the item.  Many series/issues do not give a volume number of any sort, which is why we mainly use the year.
I'd change this to either specify something more reliably present than "volume", or get really clear about what "volume" means.  
At times people have done things like "X-Men (2nd series)" but that gets really complicated very fast, and it's easy to lose track of how many series there are.  Marvel and DC have been really into frequent series relaunches in the last decade or so.
Series title, publisher, year, and maybe format (magazine vs trade vs hardcover, more on that later) will work 99% of the time.
When you use GCD URLs as examples here, are you thinking of people generally using our URLs for identification purposes, or that it would just be any URL (for instance from one of the other databases) and which source would depend on the user?
thanks,-henry