Tom, sorry I forked the discussion -- it's just that this one really gets my goat.
On 3/17/13 2:33 PM, Tom Morris wrote: > > Presumably the same is also true of: Translations into English, > Translations into Italian, Translations into French, Illustrations, > Translations into German, Readers, Translations, Translating into > French [sic], Translations into Danish, Translations from Latin, > Translations into Spanish, Translations into Russian, Sources, Calendar, > Accessible book, Protected DAISY, In library, Miniature books, No idea where these translation ones come from. Many of the headings come from LCSH -- rather than keep the whole faceted LCSH string, OL did something like FAST [1] and broke the subjects into separate units based on the subfields in the subject headings. That gave us topic, person, place, time, and genre. Other subjects, though, came in on Amazon records, which use BISAC (about which I know very little). > > What I don't understand is why one would go to the trouble of separating > out certain types of subjects, e.g.: > > PEOPLE > Ovid (43 B.C.-17 or 18 A.D), Barthélemy Aneau (d. 1561), William > Shakespeare (1564-1616), Ambrosius Metzger, Virgil, Ludovico Ariosto > (1474-1533) > PLACES > Constanța, Romania, Rome > and then mix in a bunch of random tags. Surely if you have three > categories, a fourth called "tags" or something isn't that hard. Yep, that was my argument. I also felt that users might like some suggested categories rather than being asked to make something up from zero. Obviously, my arguments did not prevail. It is hard to define a bright line between what something *is* and what it is *about*. But rather than seeing this as a philosophical argument, some cases can be made clear based on what you intend to do with the information. WEll, at least I think so. But I'm also losing this battle over at the schema.org discussion as well, so perhaps this is a minority opinion. kc [1] http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast.html -- 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]
