On Jan 3, 2005, at 4:42 PM, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote: > The suggestion is to restructure the schema so that it will enforce > the rule that the authority, variants, and relateds are all the same > type. (Actually the suggestion was to use another language that can > enforce this, but it's easy enough to do with XML schema.) I definitely think the authority and variants should be validated of the same type. Otherwise, it makes no sense. > I'm informed however, we really can't enforce this because there are > actually records where the types are different. Rebecca showed me an > example of a name authority with a geographic reference. ("Clinton, > Bill, > 1946-" with a reference from "United States". Rebecca can elaborate if > necessary.) I have no problem (I think) with leaving related more flexible. In the above example, "United States" is surely not a geographic variant of the name "Bill Clinton"; is it? > If we were to successfully enumerate the cases where this could > happen (doubtful) and try to force validation, the schema complexity > would > be out-of-control, don't you think? But, how complex it is all depends on how the data model is structured; doesn't it? I demonstrated how reworking the structure makes designing the validation simpler. > So perhaps leaving this unvalidated is > best? I'd say no. I think it opens up more problems than it solves. And I still think an authority name coded as "Clinton, Bill, 1946-" only makes sense to librarians ;-) Bruce