I am pleased to disagree to various levels of 'strongly" (if we can agree on a definition for it :-).
Ross earlier gave a sample of a "crossw3alk' for my MARC problem. What he supplied
-----snip
We could have something like:
<http://purl.org/DataFormat/marcxml>
. <skos:prefLabel> "MARC21 XML" .
. <skos:notation> "info:srw/schema/1/marcxml-v1.1" .
. <skos:notation> "info:ofi/fmt:xml:xsd:MARC21" .
. <skos:notation> "http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim" .
. <skos:broader> http://purl.org/DataFormat/marc .
. <skos:description> "..." .
Or maybe those skos:notations should be owl:sameAs -- anyway, that's not really the point. The point is that all of these various identifiers would be valid, but we'd have a real way of knowing what they actually mean. Maybe this is what you mean by a crosswalk.
------end
Is exactly what I meant by a "crosswalk". Basically a translating dictionary which allows any entity (system or person) to relate the various identifiers.
I would love to see a single unified set of identifiers, my life as a wrangled of record semantics would be soooo much easier. But I don't see it happening.
That does not mean we should not try. Even a unification in our space (and "if not in the library/information space, then where?" as Mike said) reduces the larger problem. However I don't believe it is a scalable solution (which may not matter if all of a group of users agree, they why not leave them to it) as, at any time one group/organisation/person/system could introduce a new scheme, and a world view which relies on unified semantics would no longer be viable.
Which means until global unification on an object (better a (large) set of objects) is achieved it will be necessary to have the translating dictionary and systems which know how to use it. Unification reduces Ray's list of 15 alternative uris to 14 or 13 or whatever. As long as that number is >1 translation will be necessary. (I will leave aside discussions of massive record bloat, continual system re-writes, the politics of whose view prevails, the unhelpfulness of compromises for joint solutions, and so on.)
Peter
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Mike Taylor
> Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 02:36
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] One Data Format Identifier (and Registry) to Rule
> Them All
>
> Jonathan Rochkind writes:
> > Crosswalk is exactly the wrong answer for this. Two very small
> > overlapping communities of most library developers can surely agree
> > on using the same identifiers, and then we make things easier for
> > US. We don't need to solve the entire universe of problems. Solve
> > the simple problem in front of you in the simplest way that could
> > possibly work and still leave room for future expansion and
> > improvement. From that, we learn how to solve the big problems,
> > when we're ready. Overreach and try to solve the huge problem
> > including every possible use case, many of which don't apply to you
> > but SOMEDAY MIGHT... and you end up with the kind of
> > over-abstracted over-engineered
> > too-complicated-to-actually-catch-on solutions that... we in the
> > library community normally end up with.
>
> I strongly, STRONGLY agree with this. It's exactly what I was about
> to write myself, in response to Peter's message, until I saw that
> Jonathan had saved me the trouble :-) Let's solve the problem that's
> in front of us right now: bring SRU into harmony with OpenURL in this
> respect, and the very act of doing so will lend extra legitimacy to
> the agreed-on identifiers, which will then be more strongly positioned
> as The Right Identifiers for other initiatives to use.
>
> _/|_ ___________________________________________________________________
> /o ) \/ Mike Taylor <[log in to unmask]>
> http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
> )_v__/\ "You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in
> the original Klingon." -- Klingon Programming Mantra
|
