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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Am 26.08.2015 um 22:48 schrieb Karen Coyle: > What I'm getting at is that the reason that we struggle with tradition al > 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 o r > corporate body. The other option is to leave name authorities alone an d > create an entire new set of identifiers (parallel, perhaps) that are > representative of the entity, not just of the label. I might humbly point out that RDA mandates the collection of /data/ for identification purposes and leaves the crafting of individualized headings merely as an option. DACS (Describing Archives - A Content Standard) has a chapter on "/describing/ creators" (emphasis mine). The archivist's vision of "authority" is communicated by EAC - Encoded Archival Context without "authority" even in its name, i.e. providing rich biographical etc. descriptions tailored to the actual corpus (admittedly, establishing identity and rudimentary normalization of name forms is only a tiny albeit important portion of the functions of these records) So I am confident that currently most authority files are under way of being transformed from collections of headings and variant headings into something more easily recognizable as a databases of core identifiying information. And of course there are authority files besides LCAuth which - possibly for a bunch of different reasons - adopted a more data-centric view on their contents some decades earlier. - From the beginning on VIAF has (among other things) been relying on the ability to extract /data/ from authority records - comparison of headings can bring you only so far and birth and death dates as such (and increasingly with granularity to the day, not the year) are essential to the process, especially if there is no bibliographical information to back the process, e.g. when trying to bridge the gap to ULAN or Wikipedia/Wikidata and other datasets with only loose ties to library-land. LC records may be lacking explicit (especially death) dates, but they usually contain a wealth of textual references which more often than not reveal exact birth dates and other important contextual information (affiliations, notable works, places of birth, death and activity). So as information resources to be consulted by humans for identification purposes these records are absolutely up to most needs, they are just lacking data-ness. As do biographic encyclopedias by the way. Other information resources on the web may be richer in data (and poorer in information at the same time) and can be used as providers of complimentary data. In a sense, the actual contents of an authority record don't even matter that much, the more connections to other resources are established, the more the identity is determined by these relations and not by information recorded *in* the record. Any single data element might be wrong or contrived and still the identity holds true. Think of pseudepigraphic authors of the Late Antiquity - not even their name is known and yet they have a very distinct identity! Eventually not only a name like "Pseudo Galenus" but also an identifier like no2011008661 by itself serves as a cipher and the act of spelling it out already evoces (or at least encompasses) everything that can possibly be known, thought or felt about that entity. (Semantically. I'm not advocating to encode the complete information of our universe into triples and pour a substantial part of them out on the unfortunate soul chanting the magic no2011008661) viele Gruesse Thomas Berger -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iJwEAQECAAYFAlXeOw0ACgkQYhMlmJ6W47OTJwP/TQimrys1JKCtLEfoVvrfl7rE jkFKLHO7WKSz3c5300/DoLHKvio5uaFzdXPdymdbs+H3aKgg59i1BfGYnpKIyJMk gBtQowCSCpbh13bbmL03TwMEjU3u31r3j1pBeN2QdM+RXSOBX7vGFP9sxnvZx4SF CRmTztRfQfw/+XZ8Odk= =Dr+F -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----