On 9/25/06, Michael McCracken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
A side note - I'm not in charge, I'm just loud :)
Hey, me too! :) Also, I should mention at this point (since you so graciously led the way) that I don't speak for the library/OpenURL community as a whole -- I just speak a lot.
hCite won't go that route unless a lot of people say it should. I'm personally in favor of including types and having language along the lines of "producers SHOULD include type information" - because it'll make my life easier when I write the BibDesk parser for microformatted citations.
Well, what's good for BibDesk is also probably in concert in what's good for OpenURL and, really, libraries as a whole. Bruce's proposal also works in concert. In fact, the more the metadata, the merrier. But bibtex isn't a horrible baseline and Bruce's rdf proposal isn't a horrible ideal. We (libraries) can work with any of that. DC... not so much, probably.
I just felt l should note all the options available. My last sentence might have been misleading.
Or I might have misinterpreted... I do that :)
> You'd never be able to link to an appropriate copy (because > you wouldn't be able to determine with any semblance of confidence > what an item actually is) and I'm therefore not sure what the point of > this is. I'm not sure I really understand what you're saying here, but if it is that "you won't be able to generate a valid OpenURL with no type info", then that's a very good point. If you meant something else, could you elaborate?
This is exactly what I'm saying. There are cases where a type isn't necessary (DOI, PMID, any standard identifier that's resolvable in a certain way -- ISBN/ISSN don't really count). Given the amount of 'stuff' that might be 'cited', ambiguity is 'bad' when it comes to trying to figure out what it is. So, basically, it's a lot easier to define a set of rules for 'books' (or 'most books') and have different behavior than, say, a journal article or a patent.
I think the argument that the formatted (APA, etc) style is enough to denote the type of a resource is misleading - it's enough for a human, even with incomplete information, but for a program, in the (all too common) presence of incomplete info, it's hard to get the type without being told. Actually, is anyone really making that argument? I might be worrying about nothing. I think we shouldn't require types because even a typeless citation is better than not knowing there is a citation there. Does anyone think we shouldn't have types? Certainly it sounds like Bruce doesn't want to display them - but how bad is that, really? And the flip side is - how bad, really, is hiding the types if someone wants to do that?
Hidden types are fine with me. It's non-existant types that make me antsy.
Agreed - wouldn't reference lists be more readable if they didn't need to show the volume number and pages of an article, for instance? Just people, titles and years is all I care to see as long as there's a link to the full item.
Now we're talkin! And imagine the cool databases that could be created by crawling this content... -Ross. _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
