Is a citation one datum or a package of many data? Depends on how you are thinking about it at the moment. Is "39°47'27"N 86°08'52W"" one datum, or two, or eight?
(One of the complexities of learning to think in objects is their essential duality. As with, "is light a wave or a particle," an object's fundamental nature is usually less significant than what it is that you would find most convenient w.r.t. the question at hand.) We are going to have to deal with uses of citations as packaged data and as individual data, so no matter which way we jump, we are going to wind up transforming the data one way or the other to serve the opposing need. It goes against the grain to combine different data into one column, yes. But citations aren't a good candidate for tabular representation anyway since, as pointed out, we want to cite different kinds of publications. For N kinds we'd need N+1 tables (one for each kind plus a discriminator) or a single very sparse table with lots of nulls. (Imagine a table that could cite journals, books, music albums, movies by scene, law codes....) A generalized citation is more like a union of structures than a single record type. It's a good candidate for representation in syntax rather than discrete fields. Is there much experience with this use of OpenURL representations? Is it working out well? Hmmm. As a single datum, an item either has a recommended citation or it does not. As individual fields, an item could have an incomplete citation. Is it important to be able to represent incomplete citations? -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
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