In MARC it is relatively easy to match up authors and subjects.
For example this is how Winston Churchill is listed as an author:
100 10 $aChurchill, Winston,$cSir,$d1874-1965.
from
http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_records_scriblio_net/part04.dat:119999029:773
And as a subject:
600 10 $aChurchill, Winston,$cSir,$d1874-1965.
from
http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_loc_updates/v36.i06.records.utf8:11707419:883
As you can see they're the same, but not once we load them into Open
Library.
The subject becomes http://openlibrary.org/subjects/
<http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_loc_updates/v36.i06.records.utf8:11707419:883>
person:winston_churchill_sir_(1874-1965)
<http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_loc_updates/v36.i06.records.utf8:11707419:883>
(This subject is a bit mangled with 'sir' on the end. We should either
drop the 'sir', or move it to the start.)
The author is
<http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL316976A/Winston_Churchill>http://openlibrary.org/
<http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_loc_updates/v36.i06.records.utf8:11707419:883>authors/OL316976A/Winston_Churchill
We could invent a new identifier for people and use it to represent both
subjects and authors. Here are some possibilities:
<http://openlibrary.org/person/Winston_Churchill>http://openlibrary.org/people
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Winston_Churchill>/Winston_Churchill
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Winston_Churchill>
http://openlibrary.org/people
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Winston_Churchill>/Winston_Churchill
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Winston_Churchill>_(1874-1965)
<http://openlibrary.org/show-marc/marc_loc_updates/v36.i06.records.utf8:11707419:883>
For comparison Wikipedia uses a URL like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
There are other people with this name. We could disambiguate authors
with years after the name and make /people/Winston_Churchill show a list
of people with that name, like the author search page:
http://openlibrary.org/search/authors?q=Winston+Churchill
Maybe we shouldn't include the type (/people) in the URL. Jim Pitman
gave the example of Nicolas Bourbaki, an author that isn't a single
person, but a collection of people. This could be loaded as one of these:
http://openlibrary.org/people
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>/
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>Nicolas_Bourbaki
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>
http://openlibrary.org/org
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>/
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>Nicolas_Bourbaki
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>
It is easy to imagine this author being loaded with the first
identifier, then we want to change the type, because it isn't a single
person. We could make it so authors and subjects still have a type, but
we avoid including the type in the URL. We could give the identifier as
just Nicolas_Bourbaki, and make the URL:
http://openlibrary.org/details
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>/
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>Nicolas_Bourbaki
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki> (like archive.org)
http://openlibrary.org/wiki
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>/
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki>Nicolas_Bourbaki
<http://openlibrary.org/people/Nicolas_Bourbaki> (like Wikipedia)
Other wikis don't contain a hierarchy in the URL. It makes links
simpler, we could include a link to this author with in the description
of a book by just putting it in square brackets, like [[Nicolas Bourbaki]].
--
Edward.
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