Hello Bruce,
Would it alleviate your concern if you could use something like foaf:focus [1] to link instances of mads:Authority to instances of foaf:Person?
This is what VIAF does (e.g., [2]), and there's nothing in the the current design of MADS/RDF that forbids it, since mads:Authority is a sub-class of skos:Concept.
Best,
Antoine
[1] http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_focus
[2] http://viaf.org/viaf/24604287/rdf.xml
> I've been away from this since my flaming away. Just wanted to chime
> in on Rob's points ...
>
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:56 AM, Rob Styles<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> Hi all, my 2 pence worth...
>>
>> Not a regular here, joining you specifically for the MADS/RDF discussion.
>>
>> ** Comments so far
>> Some of the comments so far are a tad harsh. It's great to see LoC
>> doing this stuff even if it's not exactly as one might have approached
>> it. They know their data, maybe we should try to be a bit more
>> supportive?
>
> Fair enough. But I do think we need to meet each other half way
> ("their data" is also "our data" in my view), and I think your
> comments are helpful (definitely more than mine) towards that end.
>
>> ** Conceptual approach
>> I've worked with library data for a long time and it's not simple
>> stuff. A common first mistake is often to assume that something like
>> the name authority talks about people and organisations when in fact
>> it talks about "bibliographic entities" — the names printed in books,
>> mostly.
>
> Yes, I get this sort of indirection. But as an author of some of those
> bibliographic items, I'm still a person. And there needs to be a way
> to bring these two perspectives together. Concretely, if I have a
> description of Samuel Clemens in FOAF, I really want to know how to
> link that to some description of his pen persona/alter ego Mark Twain.
>
>> These have been modelled and re-modelled over many years and authority
>> data has evolved to meet specific needs. It is not an ideal starting
>> point for publishing Linked Data.
>>
>> However, I think authority data could be approached differently to
>> MADS/RDF. Where MADS/RDF uses bibliographic terms, many of which come
>> from the record structures employed, I would prefer to see real-world
>> terminology used. So, a class of "Name" would be a good thing to have,
>> then we can talk about names. Where it is possible to identify a real
>> person it would be good to use a class of Person (ideally the foaf
>> one) and where we know the name is a pseudonym it would be great to
>> have a Pseudonym class too. The current MADS/RDF approach remodels the
>> authority /record/ where it may be preferable to model the authority
>> /data/.
>
> To me, this (natural language terms, rather than jargon) would go a
> long way towards resolving some of my impulsive reaction against what
> I was seeing.
>
>> The downside to that approach is that it can make round-tripping
>> between the syntaxes harder. Consider round-tripping MARC and MARC/XML
>> as compared with MARC and Dublin-Core XML?
>
> So this really comes down to what the priorities are for this effort?
> Is it absolutely clean round-tripping with legacy data, or is it to
> bring library data into the linked data world? Obviously one can try
> to do both, but there's some clear tension here.
>
>> I would look again at anywhere you have a structure word such as
>> /element/, /list/ or value as they are likely to be describing a
>> record rather than describing things from the world.
>
> Right.
>
> I guess in the end, I'd really like the designers behind this effort
> to imagine that people other than library people might also want to
> use these data in the end, and to imagine how that might work.
>
> Imagine a case where some developer somewhere is writing some simple
> PHP application and wants to store some bibliographic data, but also
> wants to be able to link into some LoC SPARQL endpoint to enhance it.
> How would they do that? How would they know how to get what kinds of
> data, to present it how to their users?
>
> Right now, MADS RDF seems to me to be only intelligible to someone
> with a library degree, or with an awful lot of free time on their
> hands.
>
> And I agree, BTW, with Karen's suggestion that it makes sense to treat
> MADS (or insert other library representation) name representations (I
> don't, personas?) as distinct from foaf:Agent or foaf:Person, but to
> enable them to be linked.
>
> [snip]
>
> Bruce
>
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