At 12:02 PM 6/4/2008, Karen Coyle wrote:
And your definition of "person" will determine what these relevant data
elements are, and what you can do with this data. If you your persons
are bibliographic entities then they can't interact with data about
"real" persons (LDAP databases, the copyright renewal database, the
social security death index,.... etc.) unless somewhere a clear
connection is made between the bibliographic and the non-bibliographic
identities. This is why I am concerned about limiting ourselves just to
name forms - it limits what we can do with our data.
Perhaps Person is the wrong term for this entity and the name should
reflect its nature as a bibliographic concept.
Then again, we still have to deal with the "actual person as subject"
case. People do write biographies about the real people behind the
bibliographic identities. I don't think this is the same entity as the
bibliographic "persona" yet we are using the same entity for both. This
is probably where my dis-ease comes in.
I now see what you are trying to say about Person. Yes, Person is a
bibliographic entity which may not have a one-to-one relationship
with an "actual" person. And I would note that your exception for
subjects is probably not warranted: a bibliographic identity can be
the subject of a work, just as much as an "actual" biological person.
However, I would note that in 99.9% of the cases, the bibliographic
identity and the biological person are identical. I would hate to
torture the model in order to deal with that 0.1% that raise
problems. Perhaps what we need is an element (data about data) that
signals when the entity represents only the bibliographic identity
and should therefore not be assumed to map to person entities in
other data sources.
John
