Er, how many records are we talking about?

I don't really see this table getting too unmanageable.  He's not frbrizing
Worldcat this way, after all.

-Ross.

On 5/22/06, Jonathan Gorman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>