Thanks Ross - I have been pushing some cataloguing folk to comment on some
of this as well (and have some feedback) - but I take the point that wider
consultation via autocat could be a good idea. (for some reason this makes
me slightly nervous!)s

In terms of whether Education--England--Finance is authorised or not - I
think I took from Andy's response that it wasn't, but also looking at it on
authorities.loc.gov it isn't marked as 'authorised'. Anyway - the relevant
thing for me at this stage is that I won't find a match via id.loc.gov - so
I can't get a URI for it anyway.

There are clearly quite a few issues with interacting with LCSH as Linked
Data at the moment - I'm not that keen on how this currently works, and my
reaction to the MADS/RDF ontology is similar to that of Bruce D'Arcus (see
http://metadata.posterous.com/lcs-madsrdf-ontology-and-the-future-of-the-se),
but on the otherhand I want to embrace the opportunity to start joining some
stuff up and seeing what happens :)

Owen

On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Owen Stephens <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Then obviously I lose the context of the full heading - so I also want to
> > look for
> > Education--England--Finance (which I won't find on id.loc.gov as not
> > authorised)
> >
> > At this point I could stop, but my feeling is that it is useful to also
> look
> > for other combinations of the terms:
> >
> > Education--England (not authorised)
> > Education--Finance (authorised! http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85041008
> )
> >
> > My theory is that as long as I stick to combinations that start with a
> > topical term I'm not going to make startlingly inaccurate statements?
>
> I would definitely ask this question somewhere other than Code4lib
> (autocat, maybe?), since I think the answer is more complicated than
> this (although they could validate/invalidate your assumption about
> whether or not this approach would get you "close enough").
>
> My understanding is that Education--England--Finance *is* authorized,
> because Education--Finance is and England is a free-floating
> geographic subdivision.  Because it's also an authorized heading,
> "Education--England--Finance" is, in fact, an authority.  The problem
> is that free-floating subdivisions cause an almost infinite number of
> permutations, so there aren't LCCNs issued for them.
>
> This is where things get super-wonky.  It's also the reason I
> initially created lcsubjects.org, specifically to give these (and,
> ideally, locally controlled subject headings) a publishing
> platform/centralized repository, but it quickly grew to be more than
> "just a side project".  There were issues of how the data would be
> constructed (esp. since, at the time, I had no access to the NAF), how
> to reconcile changes, provenance, etc.  Add to the fact that 2 years
> ago, there wasn't much linked library data going on, it was really
> hard to justify the effort.
>
> But, yeah, it would be worth running your ideas by a few catalogers to
> see what they think.
>
> -Ross.
>



-- 
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]