On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
I agree with Karen that this isn't really an edge case (although Jim's example is one of the more unusual corporate authors). I think you treat it is analogous to the way you deal with human authors -- that is, co-type the author with Organization or Government Agency or whatever else the author represents. Here are some views of what this looks like with multiple types applied: Authors which are Organizations http://www.freebase.com/view/user/tfmorris/default_domain/views/organization_authors (including the famous Nicolas Bourbaki http://www.freebase.com/view/en/nicolas_bourbaki) Authors which are Companies http://www.freebase.com/view/user/tfmorris/default_domain/views/company_authors > 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. That may be the intent, but it isn't the reality today. There are large numbers of corporate authors in the database. Look at the results for this search http://openlibrary.org/search/authors?q=adobe for just a small sample. > The FOAF > Person does not imply a natural person, and can be used for any > assertion of person-ness. The spec says "The Person class represents people," which I infer to mean natural people since that's the common usage. I think Person's superclass foaf:Agent may be what you want (it's also a superclass of foaf:Organization and foaf:Group). On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Karen Coyle <[email protected]> wrote: > Quoting Rob Styles <[email protected]>: > >> Pre-conceived notions, yes. But the fact that the two vocabularies >> provide different terms doesn't make the thing a different type of >> thing necessarily. The two vocabularies provide for describing >> different aspects of the same thing. > > How do you know that? Because they both use the word Person? > >> >> Someone can be a person, author a work and be part of a social network >> all at the same time without it becoming inconsistent. > > Of course. But there's a big difference between real life and metadata. True, but the way metadata works in the RDF world is with multiple fragmentary vocabularies which get selected and mixed together when the application is designed. The unfortunately named FOAF vocabulary and the BIO vocabulary both describe different attributes of people. I'd expect an "author" vocabulary, whatever its source, to describe attributes associated with authoring works and use other vocabularies for other aspects of person-ness or organization-ness. Tom _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
