Quoting Owen Stephens <o...@ostephens.com>:
I agree this is a risk, and I suspect there is a further risk around
simply the feeling of 'ownership' by the community - perhaps it is
easier to feel ownership over an entire ontoloy than an 'application
profile' of somekind.
It maybe that mapping is the solution to this, but if this is really
going to work I suspect it needs to be done from the very start -
otherwise it is just another crosswalk, and we'll get varying views
on how much one thing maps to another (but perhaps that's OK - I'm
not looking for perfection)
I agree with Owen here. One of the advantages of using a mixed
vocabulary is that it forces you to think about your own data in
relation to that of others, and thus makes it less likely that you
will end up in a silo. Just creating your data in RDF is not enough to
making linking happen. Look at where LCSH sits on the LD cloud[1] and
you see that there are very few links to it. That's not because it
isn't in proper RDF, it's because quite frankly no one outside of
libraries has much use for library subject headings in their current
state.
I think that "we" (whoever "we" is in this case) should be working
hard to create links from RDA elements (which are already defined in
RDF)[2] to other vocabularies, like FOAF, DC, BIBO, etc. If it should
turn out that links of that nature cannot be made, for example because
the content of the data would be significantly different ("Tolkien, J.
R. R., John Ronald Reuel, 1892-1973" v. "J. R. R. Tolkien") then we
need to find a way to MAKE our data play well with that of others. The
problem that we have, IMNSHO, is not so much our data FORMAT but our
DATA itself. If we don't consider linking outside of the library
world, we will just create another silo for ourselves; an RDF silo,
but still a silo.
(As an aside, there is some concern that the use of FRBR will make
linking from library bibliographic data to non-library bibliographic
data difficult, if not impossible. Having had some contact with
members of the FRBR review group, they seem impervious to that concern.)
kc
[1] http://linkeddata.org
[2] http://rdvocab.info
That said, I believe we need absolutely to be aiming for a world in
which we work with mixed ontologies - no matter what we do other,
relevant, data sources will use FOAF, Bibo etc.. I'm convinced that
this gives us the opportunity to stop treating what are very mixed
materials in a single way, while still exploiting common properties.
For example Musical materials are really not well catered for in
MARC, and we know there are real issues with applying FRBR to them -
and I see the implementation of RDF/Linked Data as an opportunity to
tackle this issue by adopting alternative ontologies where it makes
sense, while still assigning common properties (dc:title) where this
makes sense.
HOWEVER!
When we're done talking about ontologies and vocabularies, we need to
talk about identifiers, and there I would swing the other way and let
reuse govern, because it is when you reuse an identifier you start
thinking about what that identifiers means to *both* parties. Or, put
differently ;
It's remarkably easier to get this right if the identifier is a
number, rather than some word. And for that reason I'd say reuse
identifiers (subject proxies) as they are easier to get right and
bring a lot of benefits, but not ontologies (model proxies) as they
can be very difficult to get right and don't necessarily give you what
you want.
Agreed :)
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
