On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 13:14:37 -0400, "Barbara B Tillett" <[log in to unmask]>
said:

> I've spoken and written for several years about the concepts of a
> virtual international authority file.  One use is for international
> displays to let the user decide the language/script they want to prefer,
> while enabling the clustering/linking of variant forms to enhace the
> precision of searches.  Other possibilities are to provide
> links/navigation to resources by or about the entity identified by the
> authority data (links to authoritative biographical references, links to
> bibliographic databases for works by/about the person or corporate body
> or family or on a particular subject (concept, event, place, time,
> object)).  There are many possibilities, and I'd love to see MADS enable
> more than we can do with MARC. - Barbara Tillett

Yes, I was thinking about some of this sort of thing as I was thinking
about the possiblities of MADS.  As a consumer of bibliographic data, I
can envision a few years down the road an LoC-based web service where I
could highlight an author name in an article I am reading onscreen,
select an option and retreive the authority file for information on the
author, including links to other references, and the ability to then
link from there to local library catalogs.

The more I think of the possiblities, the more I see parallels with the
RDF/semantic web stuff.  Anyone looked at the FOAF work?  It's an RDF
schema that represent, among other things, people and their
relationships.

Here's a rather complete example of such a file:

http://norman.walsh.name/foaf

Bruce