On Mon, 22 May 2006, Houghton,Andrew wrote:

>
> I don't think a two column table relating ISBN to ISBN is the
> proper data model.  As Ben pointed out in his message: "But if
> we cross-reference every ISBN to every other, we'll have a
> factorial number of rows, which is probably less than optimal."
> It also means that the SQL table isn't fully normalized.
>

No, I don't either, but it's simpler.  Which was why I was a bit curious
about it.  Also, I missed the important fact they were only going to
display the links for those contained within the same catalog.  My mind
was already going to a openurl-type service.  A scenario where one might
want to know the related ISBNs, but there might be relatively few source
ISBNs compared to "related" ISBNs.  The performance cost might be less
than the effort of creating and maintaining a "FRBR" key for each work.
Of course, I'm happy to find some of the OCLC work on FRBR groups that I
didn't know about.  Looks like something to go back and look at some more
during lunch.

So sorry for the cruddy advice Ben ;).

Jonathan T. Gorman
Visiting Research Information Specialist
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
216 Main Library - MC522
1408 West Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: (217) 244-4688