On 7/27/14, 3:41 AM, Thomas Berger wrote:
> With XML documents there was a distinction between data centric
> and document centric approaches, often characterized by the
> permission of "mixed content". Traditional bibliographic
> records somehow redundantly follow both approaches, i.e. you
> have "data" in MARC 100 and 700 and the same facts recorded again
> as parts of the text in 245$c. Especially in cases where the
> redundancy is not very high, i.e. when the form recorded in
> the statement of responsibility grossly deviates from the form
> given in the heading one would wish for additional markup
> linking the substring in the SoR with the heading or - like TEI does -
> embedding heading information in markup distinguishing the name
> in the SoR.
>
> Now RDF (with string data types) enforces a strict data-centric
> view on our bibliographic situation which even in circumstances
> we usually consider as "pure data" fails to provide appropriate
> descriptions.
As I said earlier in this thread:
3. I'm not convinced that it makes sense to convert the entire document that is a "bibliographic description" to RDF, any more than I would want to convert an entire web page to RDF. RDF was designed to surface the data hidden in web pages, not to turn the entire web into triples.
There are aspects of our data that are document-like, and I see no
reason to force these into RDF if they don't fit comfortably. We need to
turn the question around, from "How do I fit this into RDF?" to "What do
I want to do with this data?" If we wish to provide users with notes
about the resource, reviews, or handy hints as to where to find it on
the library shelves, there's no reason that these have to be in RDF. If
they are, it is for the convenience of processing, not because they
result in useful RDF (which is, as you say, designed for linkable data).
At the same time, I question the need to carry forward certain
practices, like reversing author names to the comma-delimited form,
which exists solely to support alphabetical order [1]. We (will) have an
identifier for the person, and we can have any number of display forms.
We need to re-think our data for the web, not try to turn the web into a
card catalog.
kc
[1] Where I question alphabetical order:
http://kcoyle.net/presentations/thinkDiff.pdf
--
Karen Coyle
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m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
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