Re: Brainstorming: Key Issues

On 2/22/11 11:30 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Quoting Antoine Isaac <aisaac@few.vu.nl>:
>
>
>>
>> + Need to carefully articulate library value vocabularies (concepts, terms) with real world entities they stand for. Library entities are "proxies" for real things, which linked data has as core focus. Perhaps this needs some education of the LD community, ie, convince them that there is any value in having such proxies. And identifying appropriate mechanisms (ie. efficient in terms of data creation and consumption) to represent this (a-la skos:Concept + foaf:focus)
>
> I'll add this in, but I'm not sure you'll get consensus on this one. Or at least, there will be differences in what people assume is the "real thing" being represented. E.g. library catalog entry is seen by some as a surrogate for the book; the subject headings are thus part of the surrogate for the book, not representatives of real world objects -- thus topic "Eiffel Tower" in catalog entry represents the topic of book, not the tower itself.
>
> We could spend the rest of our time on this question, so perhaps it should be introduced in the document as a question that needs to be answered, rather than an answer that needs to be accepted.


Yes, but I think this will be the case for many issues in our report, won't it?

Note that here all I would be expecting is a brief description/examplification of the problem. A bit as you did; by RWO I meant only the Eiffel Tower itself indeed. The point is that the general linked data crowd finds it quite unnatural that "topics" should be given their own life as resources next to the RWO ones.
So we'd need to explain:
- the legacy aspects (millions of "topics" are there),
- the benefits of the approach (especially, it would be cleaner for data management and alignment)
- and some hints at how to handle it with SW tech in a way that still make some sense for the common data consumer, as Jeff did in his mail (on way could be indeed to advocate that "topics" representations should be aligned with RWO representations, as much as possible).
It can remain quite shallow (I would not expect here a theory on the notions of "surrogate" or "proxy") as long as it demonstrates well enough the importance of the problem.

Can such an approach fit what you have in mind for this "issues"? Or do you think such a paragraph (I think it can be as small as the above) would be too big already?

Antoine

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2011 08:41:37 UTC