This involves some careful thinking, not least because various culture workers have adopted a practice which questions the role of the "author":
Multiple names: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-use_name Here a name may be used precisely to provoke ambiguity, and where a name is used in that fashion it should be noted. If there is reason to conclude that a particular book has been authored by a particular person, then I think it would be sensible if a reference to evidence for this is also included. all the best Fabian > > 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* > _______________________________________________ > Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss > Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list - Ol-discuss@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/ol-discuss@archive.org/ To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-discuss-unsubscr...@archive.org
