I'm only a casual observer/participant in OL, but I can share what I've seen lately.
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Lee Passey <[email protected]> wrote: > As I understand the merging process, when someone (or some 'bot) recognizes > that two author records represent the same Entity one of the records is > selected as the "master" record (in this case probably OL11111A, as it has the > lower id). The second record is then re-written to redirect queries to the > designated "master" record (presumably other data from the second record is > also merged into the first, but I'm not confident that that is happening). Based on doing a bunch of author merges lately: I don't know how much of the data from secondary author entries are migrated into the primary, but I know that dates and pictures are migrated if the master record did not have them. > Work/Edition OL54321W ("The Adventures of...") will continue to refer to > OL22222A (Mark Twain) as its author; it is the responsibility of the software > to follow the chain of redirection to OL11111A (Samuel Clemens). Effectively, > we now have two non-exclusive OL ids which both refer to a single Entity (Mark > Twain/Samuel Clemens). Based on what I have seen in merging authors, that is not how the current author merge process works, or at least is supposed to work when things are not broken. The works (and their editions) belonging to the secondary author record *are* updated with the new primary author ID. The indexes lag in updates, and I have seen some breakage, so it is possible to find some records in the state you describe. But that would be an exception; it does not appear to me to accurately describe the current OL design. > Now what happens if we merge "Huck Finn" with his "Adventures..."? Again, I > don't know if this is what actually happens, but I would expect that in this > case one of the Work records (probably OL12345W) would be designated the > "master" work record, and the second record (OL54321W) would be re-written to > become a redirection to the "master" Work. Yes. Poor little "WorkBot" has taken a pounding with all the author merges I've thrown at him, but that is how it works currently. > (A work record can have but one > title. I don't know how the alternate title issue would be resolved, but this > issue is actually unrelated to the current scenario.) There is an alternate title field at the edition level, but not at the work level. - Alan _______________________________________________ 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]
