RE: Issue 3 - Trust Mechanisms in OCLC Authority Control Service

Hi MacKenzie, Dave Reynolds

I think the point Dave is raising is subtley different so I will try
paraphrasing and perhaps Dave can correct me if I am wrong.

"Currently we access authority files, and we know they are correct because
they come from a central authority we trust e.g. OCLC. However it is also
desirable to have local authority files, and possibly pool local authority
files between different organizations for example different DSpace users.
Therefore one potential problem is how to integrate and resolve these
different information sources. 

One of the ideas that the Semantic Web wants to explore is how to represent
trust on the Semantic Web i.e. given a big sea of metadata, how do we 
- indicate the origin of the metadata
- and that the metadata is intact and has not been modified since it was
produced 
So rather than trusting something because we got it from somewhere, we trust
it because we inspect it and find it to be trustworthy. For example, one
proposed method here is cryptographic signing. Such methods could be used in
the authority file use case, and this would have the advantage of
simplifying the integration of different information sources as we know
longer have to worry about where something came from, we can just determine
trust via inspection."

I guess
http://www.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/SWTSGuide/
is a good starting point for references here. 

So my questions are
1. Have I paraphrased Dave R correctly?
2. If so, should the OCLC use case be considering this?
3. If so, how important is it to the OCLC use case?

Mark

> Hi Mark,
> 
> I guess I do agree with Dave on this, and I think OCLC is 
> already thinking
> along these lines too, however they imagined that the central 
> authority
> might be able to invoke those locally-defined authority files 
> if they failed
> to find a match in their central authority file... Either 
> way, we know for
> certain that global/central authority files won't be 
> sufficient for normalizing
> names in DSpace/SIMILE-type systems, since so many of the authors
> are first-time publishers who won't have established name authority
> records, so we do need to come up with some mechanism to allow for
> less-authoritative (or trusted) sources.
> 
> MacKenzie/
> 
> At 01:51 PM 5/21/2003 +0100, Butler, Mark wrote:
> >Hi team,
> >
> >please can I have some comments, particularly from 
> MacKenzie, on this issue
> >from Dave Reynolds. Specifically, do the PIs agree with Dave 
> that this is
> >should be part of the OCLC use case?
> >
> >thanks, M
> >
> >[ 003. ]
> >Summary: Trust mechanisms in OCLC Authority Control Service
> >Raised By: Dave Reynolds
> >Status: open
> >Description:
> >
> >The OCLC Authority Control Service use case is interesting. 
> I wonder is this
> >could be framed as a test case for trust mechanisms. 
> Supposing that entry
> >validation against authority files could be made much more 
> decentralized.
> >Local
> >communities would be free to adopt small, locally controlled 
> authority files
> >and
> >services. Entries could be checked against those as well as 
> the central or
> >global authority services. Such entries would include, in 
> their provenance
> >information, the authority files used (perhaps with an optional
> >cryptographic
> >signature). Thus one could support multiple alternative 
> field values with
> >different levels of authority, future mappings between 
> overlapping authority
> >files can then be applied retrospectively. Seems like there 
> could be a value
> >to
> >users of having local, easy to update authority files for 
> some fields.
> 
> MacKenzie Smith
> Associate Director for Technology
> MIT Libraries
> Building 14S-208
> 77 Massachusetts Avenue
> Cambridge, MA  02139
> (617)253-8184
> kenzie@mit.edu
>

Received on Tuesday, 27 May 2003 06:35:17 UTC