On 02/09/2013 03:30, Patrick Conley wrote:
BTW: Imho it would be helpful if OL would distinguish between a person
(an individual author) and a name (VIAF used the term "undifferentiated").
As Tom has mentioned, there is firstly a distinction to make between
individuals and corporate bodies, meetings, etc. Once you know you're
talking about individual authors, you can then get on to the issue of
verification/identity.
The two kind of pages could be marked by using colors:
- a white author page (for example) would imply: name, disambiguation,
unverified information
- a light blue page: person (with year of birth, occupation, external
links etc.), verified information
Some thought probably needs to be given to what we would mean by
"verified". For example, we could mean "we have found information about
this author in another source", or we could mean "we have enough
evidence to be sure of this author's identity".
My own feeling is that we should let the data speak for itself. If an
author record contains birth and death dates and a couple of "sameAs"
links to e.g. VIAF and dbpedia, then it is self-evidently more precise
(and useful) than an entry containing just a name. Conversely, asserting
that two records refer to the same individual will always be something
of a judgement call. Across the whole of humanity, even name plus year
of birth and death isn't going to guarantee a unique identity (though it
may work well enough in the more limited context of "people who have
written books").
We should probably be realistic about this: it appears that recording
author birth and death dates is seen as a bit of a luxury in a
bibliographic context. Only about 5% of the OL author records have this
information: I have just under 350,000 records in my extracted dump
(which does exclude living authors born after 1950). I notice that the
VIAF API does not support searching by author birth or death date.
Richard
--
*Richard Light*
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