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On 8/26/15 10:20 AM, Robert Sanderson wrote: > If the authority *describes* the person, why is that information > associated with the authority and not just with the person? On the > other hand, if the authority is an existing identifier for the person, > rather than a description of them, then identifiedBy makes sense to > me. The bf:Authority would play the same role as the bf:Identifier, > in that it's a resource which carries a string that has been used to > identify the subject of the triple. Here's how I look at name authorities: name authorities (as their name implies) exist to establish the preferred label for a person, corporate body, or family. Before automation, the name authority entry was just another card, and was used during cataloging to determine the form of name (label) to include in the bibliographic description. Only the label existed to distinguish that entity from another. After automation, unfortunately, the label continued to be used to represent the entity; although authority records have identifiers, these are essentially invisible, unused except for record update. The down side of using the label to represent the entity is that labels can change, such that "Smith, John, 1932- " later becomes "Smith, John, 1932-2010", or "Boyle, T. Coraghessan" becomes "Boyle, T. C.". As an identifier, a label sucks. But conceptually, behind that label was indeed the identity for an entity of great importance for bibliographic control. It makes sense to use the authority record ID as an identifier for the person(a) because it already exists, and it connects you to the authority record. However, authority records have very little information about the RWO because that never was their focus. For example, the birth and death dates function as disambiguation strings in the label display, and entities for which disambiguation was not needed do not have those dates (although lately that has not strictly been the case, which makes it all even murkier). Birth and death dates haven't been included as information about the person but as information added to the preferred label *where needed*. Other information, such as where the person was born, or when the company was founded, family relationships - these are logical bits of information that were never part of authority data because AC existed solely to create an unambiguous label string. What I'm getting at is that the reason that we struggle with traditional authorities in RDF is that they do not have the qualities that an RDF graph about a person might have. We might use the existing name authorities record identifiers as URIs, but the thing that is today an authority record will not be adequate as a graph describing a person or corporate body. The other option is to leave name authorities alone and create an entire new set of identifiers (parallel, perhaps) that are representative of the entity, not just of the label. I personally would like to see the concept of authorities progress from the determination of labels to actual information resources, of which labels are a part but not the only focus. Key, however, will be a cultural change that accepts the shift from label creation to entity description. This is the part that I think we are not yet agreed on, and IMO it is holding us back in our work to create a richer library data landscape. kc -- Karen Coyle [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net m: +1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600