Re: Better description for 'keywords' property

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 07:33:15AM -0700, Karen Coyle wrote:
>Dan, it is my experience that library systems do NOT use the term 
>"keywords" for subject headings,[1] they use the term "subjects" or 
>some variation thereof. So if there are some that use "keywords" I 
>suspect they are in the minority, and that should not influence the 
>use in schema.org. Comma-delimited keywords are very common on the Web 
>and in software, and have become a kind of de facto standard.

Karen, I'm talking about the actual schema.org properties in use in
structured data, not the human-visible labels for the subject headings.
The software I'm talking about uses "Subjects" as the human visible
label too; they're not totally weird :)

>[1] Some examples from major vendors:
>
>LC (Voyager):
>
>Subjects: 	Republican Party (U.S. : 1854- )
>	United States --Politics and government --2001-2009.

http://lccn.loc.gov/2001086445 doesn't display any use of schema.org.

>OCLC:
>
>Subjects 	
>
>    Snowden, Edward J., -- 1983-
>    United States. -- National Security Agency/Central Security Service.
>    Leaks (Disclosure of information) -- United States.

OCLC WorldCat uses "about" because it has linked data to which it can
link for each subject (for example
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/864356553). This is not something which
most library systems are capable of at this point, unfortunately, but
certainly something to which we must aspire.

>
>(III):
>
>Subject 	
>Iraq War, 2003-2011
>Intelligence service -- United States
>United States -- Politics and government -- 2001-

http://alice.library.ohiou.edu/record=b4532222~S7 is an example of the
most recent III library system and it doesn't express any schema.org
metadata either.

So: for the existing library systems that currently express schema.org
and the existing properties they can use given the very realistic
constraint of only being able to express subject headings as short text
strings that look a whole lot like keywords or tags,
http://schema.org/keywords still seems like the best option.

Received on Tuesday, 20 May 2014 15:19:45 UTC