On Nov 27, 2012, at 12:05 PM, Owen Stephens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 27 Nov 2012, at 16:46, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> I think I'm simply guilty of reading it how I want it to read :)

Well, you're interpreting it as it was intended so thats a good thing ;)

>> 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.
>
> My reading of the text and given examples would be that the BIBFRAME 'authorities' will mainly provide wrappers for pointers to other stuff - whether that's LCSH or FAST or dbpedia or ... although maybe with some local structure and labels to give some performance/resilience/convenience

bingo.

From investigating both current practice as well as drawing on past experience in helping various organization expose "Authority" information via LInked Data principals, I can easily say the goals and objectives of all parties are very different. Karen has pointed out just some of these differences in this thread, but there are several more when we start to think beyond the Library community. This proposed "light weight abstraction layer" provides a means for helping lock down a simple construct that we can agree on now while encouraging other efforts (that work in parallel) to harmonize around a more common approach to exposing Authorities (that at least this community can agree upon).

--eric