Quoting Bruce D'Arcus <[log in to unmask]>:


>
> Aside: it occurs to me that foaf:PersonalProfileDocumemt and
> mads:Authority have some conceptual relationship?

Yes, most likely, although I am hard pressed to define what it is.

Library authority records are very odd beasts, and that oddity comes
out in FRAD [1]. The record is NOT about the person, per se. It does
not include information like birth and death dates, where the person
lives or lived, what they were famous for... The record exists to
establish a particular string as the form of the name to be used to
identify that agent (person, persona, corporate body...) in library
catalogs. Any information that is not needed to establish that
identity is pretty much ignored. Here is the LC authority record for me:

000 00415cz a2200133n 450
001 710543
005 19930416143026.2
008 890307n| acannaab |n aaa
010 __ |a n 89613425
035 __ |a (DLC)n 89613425
040 __ |a DLC |c DLC |d DLC
100 10 |a Coyle, Karen
670 __ |a nuc89-22212: Her RLIN II processing for UC online catalog
input, 1984 |b (hdg. on WU rept.: Coyle, Karen; usage: Karen Coyle)

There is nothing about me except my name and the provenance of that
information (the first thing that LC cataloged with my name on it). I
am a real person, yet there is no real person information about me
(e.g. date of birth, where I went to school, what my profession is)
because that was not needed to establish a unique heading ("Coyle,
Karen") that identifies me. (The heading only includes my first and
last name because I'm the first Karen Coyle in their file. If another
one writes something, her identifying string will contain a year of
birth or perhaps a middle name.)

The purpose of library authority data is very different to the
purposes of FOAF, not the least being that there is nothing much
social about library authority data. I see them as being pretty much
unrelated except that they could be linked to indicate that the same
person is "spoken of".

kc
[1] Functional Requirements for Authority Data
http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-authority-data.
Unfortunately not available online in English but the translations
include the diagrams, which explain a lot.


--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet