P1661234647711111

And now no one understands at all.  CIDOC-CRM has taken the same approach
-- it's better that everyone is equal in their non-comprehension than
people who speak a particular language are somehow advantaged.

BTW, as an English speaker, I also don't understand "other designation
associated with the corporate body", regardless of spaces or camelCase.
Labels and semantic descriptions are *always* important.

The "we might change what this means" argument is also problematic -- if
you change what it means, then you should change the URI! Otherwise people
will continue to use them incorrectly, plus the legacy data generated with
the previous definition will suddenly change what it's saying.

Finally, 1600 properties... good luck with that.

Rob



On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Hamilton, Gill <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Je ne comprends pas l'anglais.
> Je ne comprends pas l'URI otherDesignationAssociatedWithTheCorporateBody
>
> 私は日本人です。私は理解していない、そのURI
>
> Opaque URIs with human readable labels helps in an international context.
>
> Just my two yens worth :)
> G
>
> -------------------------------------
> Gill Hamilton
> Digital Access Manager
> National Library of Scotland
> George IV Bridge
> Edinburgh EH1 1EW, Scotland
> e: [log in to unmask]
> t: +44 (0)131 623 3770
> Skype: gill.hamilton.nls
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Dan
> Scott [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: 22 January 2014 21:10
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Fwd: [rules] Publication of the RDA Element
> Vocabularies
>
> Hi Karen:
>
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > I can't address the first points, but I can speak a bit to the question
> of
> > meaningful URIs. In the original creation of the RDA elements,
> "meaningful"
> > URIs were used based on the actual RDA terminology. This resulted in URIs
> > like:
> >
> >
> http://rdvocab.info/Elements/alternativeChronologicalDesignationOfLastIssueOrPartOfSequence
> >
> > and...
> >
> >
> http://rdvocab.info/Elements/alternativeChronologicalDesignationOfLastIssueOrPartOfSequenceManifestation
> >
> > Not only that, the terminology for some elements changed over time,
> which in
> > some cases meant deprecating a property that was then overly confusing
> based
> > on its name.
> >
> > Now, I agree that one possibility would have been for the JSC to develop
> > meaningful but reasonably short property names. Another possibility is
> that
> > we cease looking at URIs and begin to work with labels, since URIs are
> for
> > machines and labels are for humans. Unfortunately, much RDF software
> still
> > expects you to work with the underlying URI rather than the human-facing
> > label. We need to get through that stage as quickly as possible, because
> > it's causing us to put effort into URI "naming" that would be best used
> for
> > other analysis activities.
>
> Thanks for responding on this front. I understand that, while the
> vocabulary was in heavy active development it might have been painful
> to adjust as elements changed, but given that this marks the actual
> publication of the vocabulary, that churn should have settled down,
> and then this part of the JSC's contribution to semantic web could
> have semantics applied at both the micro and macro level.
>
> I guess I see URIs as roughly parallel to API names; as long as humans
> are assembling programs, we're likely to benefit from having
> meaningful (no air quotes required) names... even if sometimes the
> meaning drifts over time and the code & APIs need to be refactored.
> Dealing with sequentially numbered alphanumeric identifiers reminds me
> rather painfully of MARC.
>
> For what it's worth (and it might not be worth much) "curl
> http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/a/P50101 | grep "reg:name" | sort |
> uniq -c" shows that the reg:name property is unique across all of the
> agent properties, at least. Remnants of the earlier naming effort? If
> that pattern holds, those could have been simply used for the
> identifiers in place of "P#####". The most unwieldy of those appears
> to be "otherDesignationAssociatedWithTheCorporateBody" (which _is_
> unwieldy, certainly, but still more meaningful than
> http://rdaregistry.info/Elements/a/P50033).
>
> Perhaps it's not too late?
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