Ideally, though, if we have some buy in and extend this outside our communities, future identifiers *should* have fewer variations, since people can find the appropriate URI for the format and use that.
I readily admit that this is wishful thinking, but so be it. I do think that modeling it as SKOS/RDF at least would make it attractive to the Linked Data/Semweb crowd who are likely the sorts of people that would be interested in seeing URIs, anyway. I mean, the worst that can happen is that nobody cares, right? -Ross. On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Peter Noerr <pno...@museglobal.com> wrote: > I am pleased to disagree to various levels of 'strongly" (if we can agree on > a definition for it :-). > > Ross earlier gave a sample of a "crossw3alk' for my MARC problem. What he > supplied > > -----snip > We could have something like: > <http://purl.org/DataFormat/marcxml> > . <skos:prefLabel> "MARC21 XML" . > . <skos:notation> "info:srw/schema/1/marcxml-v1.1" . > . <skos:notation> "info:ofi/fmt:xml:xsd:MARC21" . > . <skos:notation> "http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim"; . > . <skos:broader> http://purl.org/DataFormat/marc . > . <skos:description> "..." . > > Or maybe those skos:notations should be owl:sameAs -- anyway, that's not > really the point. The point is that all of these various identifiers would > be valid, but we'd have a real way of knowing what they actually mean. Maybe > this is what you mean by a crosswalk. > ------end > > Is exactly what I meant by a "crosswalk". Basically a translating dictionary > which allows any entity (system or person) to relate the various identifiers. > > I would love to see a single unified set of identifiers, my life as a > wrangled of record semantics would be soooo much easier. But I don't see it > happening. > > That does not mean we should not try. Even a unification in our space (and > "if not in the library/information space, then where?" as Mike said) reduces > the larger problem. However I don't believe it is a scalable solution (which > may not matter if all of a group of users agree, they why not leave them to > it) as, at any time one group/organisation/person/system could introduce a > new scheme, and a world view which relies on unified semantics would no > longer be viable. > > Which means until global unification on an object (better a (large) set of > objects) is achieved it will be necessary to have the translating dictionary > and systems which know how to use it. Unification reduces Ray's list of 15 > alternative uris to 14 or 13 or whatever. As long as that number is >1 > translation will be necessary. (I will leave aside discussions of massive > record bloat, continual system re-writes, the politics of whose view > prevails, the unhelpfulness of compromises for joint solutions, and so on.) > > Peter > >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of >> Mike Taylor >> Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 02:36 >> To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU >> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] One Data Format Identifier (and Registry) to Rule >> Them All >> >> Jonathan Rochkind writes: >> > Crosswalk is exactly the wrong answer for this. Two very small >> > overlapping communities of most library developers can surely agree >> > on using the same identifiers, and then we make things easier for >> > US. We don't need to solve the entire universe of problems. Solve >> > the simple problem in front of you in the simplest way that could >> > possibly work and still leave room for future expansion and >> > improvement. From that, we learn how to solve the big problems, >> > when we're ready. Overreach and try to solve the huge problem >> > including every possible use case, many of which don't apply to you >> > but SOMEDAY MIGHT... and you end up with the kind of >> > over-abstracted over-engineered >> > too-complicated-to-actually-catch-on solutions that... we in the >> > library community normally end up with. >> >> I strongly, STRONGLY agree with this. It's exactly what I was about >> to write myself, in response to Peter's message, until I saw that >> Jonathan had saved me the trouble :-) Let's solve the problem that's >> in front of us right now: bring SRU into harmony with OpenURL in this >> respect, and the very act of doing so will lend extra legitimacy to >> the agreed-on identifiers, which will then be more strongly positioned >> as The Right Identifiers for other initiatives to use. >> >> _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________ >> /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <m...@indexdata.com> >> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk >> )_v__/\ "You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in >> the original Klingon." -- Klingon Programming Mantra >
