You may want to think about the display aspect. In some situations it may not be practical to display all of the variant names, so you may want to pick one. SKOS uses "prefLabel" as a way to organize displays. It's a kind of "identifier for the human reader" as some have called it. The machine uses the URI to know that two bits of metadata refer to the same thing. In a display, the prefLabel performs the same function for the human. So in the same way that you have multiple forms of the name related to one URI, you also have multiple forms of the name related to one "prefLabel" -- noting, however, that you can have different prefLabels for different languages, and with SKOSXL you should be able to have different prefLabels for different users, different circumstances, etc.
kc Quoting Lee Passey <[email protected]>: > On Wed, February 23, 2011 12:12 pm, Tom Morris wrote: > > [snip] > >> I think the direction to move is personal preference rather than no >> preference. There are many circumstances where due to either space >> constraints or other reasons, you want a single name, but rather than >> having some Library of Congress librarian choose the best name (which >> they might even do differently if they had it to do over again), tag >> the names with descriptive information and let me describe my >> preferences, then match the two sets of things together to choose the >> best default name for a given display. Is it a birth name, a >> pseudonym, the common form in language <foo>, etc? Perhaps I always >> want the author's birth name in their native language, or what they're >> known as in English, or the pseudonym under which they published the >> most books or ...? > > I totally agree. Every name field should have a "lang" property to record the > language the name is rendered in, and a "type" or "class" property that > indicates the type or classification of the name (e.g. pen name, given name, > assumed name, variant spelling, etc.) Of course, if classification > is going to > work across databases the "type" property needs to be selected from a > controlled set. Thus, each name is classified, but none are authoritative. > Anyone can use the name that is most appropriate for any particular context. > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
