On 11/27/12 8:12 AM, Owen Stephens wrote:
> I might be jumping the gun with some of these questions but just becuase I'm interested ...
>
> From the Bibliographic Framework as a Web of Data p.11
> "Authorities are not designed to compete or replace existing authority efforts but rather provide a common, light weight abstraction layer over various different Web based authority efforts to make them even more effective."
>
> From this it seems clear that it is intended that authorities can make use of existing linked data representations of LC authorities via http://id.loc.gov.

Wow, Owen. I'm impressed that you made sense of that sentence because it
was one of the ones that just said NOTHING AT ALL to me. What is a
"light weight abstraction layer" anyway? Now that you've put out a
concrete example I can see it as something like VIAF that can bring
together authority identifiers (including ones like DBPedia) from
various sources. Yes? No?

However, and partially in response to John Myers' post, there is a
difference between library authorities, which is a mechanism to control
name forms (as identifiers), and full-blown entities that represent all
information about the entity. I was hoping/assuming that our future
model would be, as John says, a set of interacting entities, and that
would mean greatly expanding beyond the minimalist authority data we
have to something much fuller. To give an example, compare this
authority record for T.C. Boyle:

http://tinyurl.com/c4gqtrb

with his Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._C._Boyle

The latter is actually a small Wikipedia page compared to many others,
but it still provides much more information that may be useful to
readers than what the authority record provides. The authority record
was always intended to be a "back room" entity. I'm hoping that what
replaces it has more information that is helpful to information seekers.
"Lightweight abstraction layer" doesn't read like that to me.

kc
> The example Bibframe serialisation supports this:
>
> <!-- BIBFRAME Topic -->
> <Topic id="http://bibframe/auth/topic/bibliography">
>
> <label>Bibliography</label>
> <generalSubdivision>Methodology</generalSubdivision>
>
> <hasIDLink resource=”http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85013838” />
>
> </Topic>
>
> I did some work previously on linking to LCSH - see page 7 onwards of this presentation http://www.slideshare.net/ostephens/linking-lcsh-and-other-stuff, and based on this experience this example prompts me to ask:
>
> Is it expected that the Topic will include textual strings representing the subject as here?
> The example here suggests that there is some structure (LCSH based) within the Topic - is that the case? How would ordering be dealt with?
> Since id.loc.gov only issues URIs for Authorised headings, how would valid but unauthorised headings be represented (this was the focus of my presentation)
>
> Representing the topic as madsrdf could solve these problems?
>
> Finally - just to pedantically note that http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85013838 is the URI for the LCSH Topical Term Bibiliography. The correct URI for Bibliography--Methodology is http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85013859
>
> Owen
>
> Owen Stephens
> Owen Stephens Consulting
> Web: http://www.ostephens.com
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Telephone: 0121 288 6936

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Karen Coyle
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