My understanding is that VIAF is alive and well. OCLC is using it as one of the supports of their WorldCat Identities service, and plans to extend it from personal names to geographic names. I suspect that if the VIAF gains wider acceptance there will be increased pressure from other communities to reform the way we create authority records, which remains anchored in the needs of card catalogs.
Thom Hickey did a presentation on VIAF at ELAG 2008, and the PowerPoint can be downloaded at http://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/file/formulier/profielelaglt_i00117278_00 1.ppt Ed Jones National University <San Diego, CA> -----Original Message----- From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [mailto:rd...@infoserv.nlc-bnc.ca] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 7:19 AM To: RDA-L@INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA Subject: Re: [RDA-L] Preferred access points for Expressions Weinheimer Jim wrote: > > I have followed the VIAF for some time and applaud the general > direction. This is the sort of project that should be given high > priority since true exchange of this type of information can lead to > genuine cooperation and a real savings in time and money for users as > well as for libraries. It would also be one of the most important > advances toward the Semantic Web, which could raise our profile > significantly. There was another project called "Onesac" in Denmark that > I consulted with briefly. If was all in RDF(!!!), had authority records > from all over Europe and was extremely advanced. It seems to have died, > however. http://www.portia.dk/websites/onesac.htm > Interesting though this looks, one wonders what became of it. Project ran until 2005 - but is there a final report? At least one would like to read what can be learnt from it. VIAF has an impressive web presence at OCLC, but even there, it is difficult to find anything about the state of the project, and esp., about impending new stages or problems they might have run into. > > The example you point out should be eminently fixable although I don't > know how it would work now: finding references of references. Using URIs > can be done in a whole variety of ways. Using URIs is not that much > different from how relational databases work today ... What exactly do you want to say here? Do you really mean relational databases? I see this term frequently used erroneously instead of "entity-relationship" databases. The word "relational" in RDBS does precisely not say that the database cares about relations between objects or entities. The term was created by mathematicians who developed the first models. For them, a "relation" was just a mathematical term taken from set theory and meaning a subset of a table. B.E.
