Quoting Jim Pitman <[email protected]>:

>
> The edge case of corporate authors needs to be accomodated. An instructive
> example is Nicolas Bourbaki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
>
> http://openlibrary.org/search?q=Nicolas+Bourbaki
>
> I note that
>
> http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL5038897A/Bourbaki_Nicolas_pseud.
>
> hints that "Nicolas Bourbaki" is a pseudonym for an organization, while
>
> http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL145730A/Nicolas_Bourbaki
>
> does not.  More straighforwardly, you may have corporate authors   
> like Committees, W3C, etc.
> I'd be interested to see how RDF experts would accommodate this fork.

I don't know how it is covered in RDF, but as you know in libraries  
corporate authors are not considered an edge case -- they "author"  
huge numbers of governmental publications as well as corporate  
publications, and rival humans in their output. OL does not store  
these as authors, however, so we can be sure that all authors are  
persons, or some other entity presenting itself as a person. The FOAF  
Person does not imply a natural person, and can be used for any  
assertion of person-ness. It does not provide a means to indicate that  
the person is a pseudonym for one or more natural persons. I would  
need to look at the latest work on the person data being developed in  
the library world, but I know that there is a debate on how important  
it is to link natural persons to the person representation.

The edge case, in my mind, is the use of conferences as authors, which  
is a practice in library data. I still have trouble wrapping my head  
around that.

kc
-- 
Karen Coyle
[email protected] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

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