I _guess_ that means a corporate body is included too? The Smith Family; British Petroleum; The American Library Association; U.S. Congress; etc. ? (Legally incorporated corporations are 'people' legally, and 'natural person' is used in legal language to distinguish from corporations. And even a non-incorporated corporate body seems as much a "person" to me as Luke Skywalker!).
I guess if you intentionally define something as "we don't mean to nitpick, any kind of person at all", then you should expect people to use it for all sorts of stuff. So.... I guess when you follow the FOAF to retrieve the thing at the other end, it would hopefully have some metadata on it telling you if the 'non nitpicked person' is a natural person, an imaginary person, a corporate body, a pseudonymous identity, or what. But note that just becuase an imaginary person is ALLOWED to be a FOAF Person entity, doens't mean that any given represenation NEEDS to represent an imaginary/fictional person as an FOAF Person, necessarily. Jonathan ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 4:18 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing Quoting Tom Morris <[email protected]>: >> 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. GIGO - OL took in some sources of data with "bad" coding -- e.g. coded corporate authors as personal authors. There's actually been talk of removing some of them, since they also tend not to merge correctly in the database. > >> 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). It goes beyond that and says: "The Person class represents people. Something is a Person if it is a person. We don't nitpic about whether they're alive, dead, real, or imaginary." So unnatural people are included. And that is an interesting variation from library practice, in which imaginary persons do not get personhood. So Luke Skywalker is a concept in LCSH, not a Person. And I don't mean that Luke is a "subject/person" -- there's nothing about the coding that includes personness -- Luke is coded the the same as "Skywalks -- Accidents." kc -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ 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] _______________________________________________ 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]
