On 4/7/2011 1:21 PM, Houghton,Andrew wrote:
> That is probably correct. England may appear as both a 110 *and* a 151 because the 110 signifies the concept for the country entity while the 151 signifies the concept for the geographic place. A subtle distinction...

This starts getting into categorization philosophy type issues, and 
reveal that LCSH isn't entirely consistent in it's modelling (as 
virtually no classification will be without being extraordinarily 
complex, the world is a messy  place), along the lines Ross was talking 
about too, but I think it can be explicated a bit....

....I'm not sure it's quite true to say that a 151 (corresponding to a 
6xx $v subdivision) is a geographic place as entirely distinct from a 
'country entity'.   I might instead say the 151 is meant to be a sort of 
geo-historical place,  that does take into account, well, either 
political entities or general contemporary conceptions of place 
distinctions at particular historical times.  While the 110 is about a 
collective-body _actor_, a government....

All of these are $v's, which presumably are authorized by authority 151s:

Soviet Union
Russia
Russia (Federation)
Former Soviet Republics

typically assigned for works about that area of the world at the time 
that area of the world was known as a particular thing, heh.

Or: Italy / Roman Empire
Byzantine Empire / Ottoman Empire / Turkey / Balkan Peninsula

Now, all those things aren't the _exact_ same longitude and lattitude, 
but with significant overlap, different in different cases. At any rate, 
151s aren't  purely a name for a geographic boundary on the planet, 
they're some kind of, um, geo-political-historical concept.

Compare to the terms you can put in an 048, which ARE meant to be 
history and political entity free. e-ur == "Russia. Russian Empire. 
Soviet Union. Former Soviet Republics". Yeah, all of em together. 
Nevermind they dont' have exactly the same boundaries. (And of course 
the boundaries of any one of em can and did change over time).  At least 
048's MOSTLY try to be purely geographical, free of historical/political 
context, but then sometimes they go ahead and add weird ones that can't 
possibly follow that principle, like d= "Developing Countries" or 
dd="Developed Countries".

But yeah, then we've got the 110 England, which isn't a "geographical" 
concept AT ALL, it refers really to the Government/political _actor_  
(as a collective body)  known as "England". Which happens to have 
controlled or claimed certain geographic territory for itself at 
different times, but the 110 England isn't about the geographic 
territory, it's about the collective-body actor. (Does that even still 
exist? What is it's contemporary or historical relationship to the 
concepts "United Kingdom" and "Great Britain", are those political 
actors too?)

Somewhere I read an article about the particular messiness of geographic 
vocabularies, as discussed above, I forget where.  Wish I could find it 
again, it would be helpful here.  But modelling the real world with a 
subject vocabulary is inherently messy, especially so with geographic 
classification like this that is meant to somehow cover all of recorded 
human history too. The map is not the territory.