On 5/30/13 6:34 AM, Trail, Nate wrote:
> I'm not so worried about RDA rules on using terms instead of codes. If a cataloger chooses a text term from a picklist, she may think she's recorded the term, but behind the scenes, a uri is recorded. Both sides are happy.
> Nate

Nate, you are right, but there's a catch. Let me tell a story. When we
were creating the RDF for RDA we decided to use the RDA name for the
term in the RDF property. In part this was so that JSC could look at the
RDF in the Metadata Registry and see the correlation with their work.
This, however, resulted in teratologies like:

http://rdvocab.info/Elements/noteonChangesinContentCharacteristicsExpression

People complained.

In creating the RDF for FRBRer, Gordon Dunsire decided to use codes
instead. At some point, codes will be displayed to humans as friendly
language terms, but early developers end up seeing the URIs with the
codes themselves. So what they see is:

http://iflastandards.info/ns/fr/frbr/frbrer/P3086

People complained.

The upshot is that it doesn't matter whether it's a code, a language
term, or a randomly generated set of characters. What matters is whether
YOU understand it. MARC terms have become a language because people
understand the codes directly, without any translation to natural
language. We know that in the future cataloging interfaces will show
catalogers something that they, presumably, understand. We also need to
help early developers and reviewers get a grip on what they are looking
at. I find it interesting/odd that so many RDF or OWL ontologies do not
display natural language labels in the place of URIs. Even though the
mantra is that URIs are for machines, we keep showing them to people.

kc
p.s. The BIBFRAME vocabulary pages are very nice, and in fact COULD mask
URIs that don't use terms. But I bet someone would complain about how
hard it is to remember the URL for the page. :-)

>
> -------------------------------------------
> Nate Trail
> -------------------------------------------
> LS/TECH/NDMSO
> Library of Congress
> 202-707-2193
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
> Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2013 6:21 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] Consistency
>
> 29.05.2013 18:59, Diane Hillmann:
>> I found the same kinds of things when aggregating NSDL data about a
>> decade ago, though of course on a smaller scale! (Defaults with
>> various misspellings of 'unknown' were my particular trigger). I think
>> that what would help us avoid having to cope with crappy text into our
>> dotage is to build tools that help us serve up standardized text when
>> we think we still need it, while not actually creating or storing it
>> as text. We know humans will continue to make these kinds of errors if
>> we ask them to enter text during the cataloging process, but if users
>> need to see these kinds of notes, we need to build smarter tools to make it happen.
>>
> Exactly. I cannot understand why RDA does not, wherever possible, advocate the use of codes instead of English text. And all MARC specimens of RDA data abound with verbiage although codes do exist, as for example in the 33X's. One important aspect is international exchange and multilingual catalog interfaces, the other is most certainly consistency. As you point out, software should of course be able to catalogers with comfortably inputting codes with not having to know the numbers or acronyms literally, and OPAC software can display whatever text is found suitable for the situation at hand. Imstead, English language verbosity and loquatiousness abound in the data, with excessively long labels in XML designs to make your head spin and at the same time increasing the probability of errors, i.e.
> inconsistencies.
> The front end for catalogers will likely be the most important aspect of RDA cataloging if it is ever to become a success story.
> It will have to be much more efficient than MARC.
> With BIBFRAME, I see little hope of this happening, more to the contrary.
> (Furthermore, it doesn't help that the RDA scripture is under lock and key of a global monopoly.)
>
> B.Eversberg

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Karen Coyle
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