>Web pages are a _presentation_ of authority data, the actual authority
data
>needs to live in a structured way such that software can extract all the
>meaning out of it that the cataloger's put in.
While I agree that a stock presentation of an authority record in free
flowing HTML probably doesn't appear to accomplish much on its own, a web
object might still foster gathering/discussion/sharing points that are
useful in other spaces. For example, the work on wikipedia and name
authorities in Germany that was described in 2005 on Web4Lib suggested a
fruitful relationship between dereferencable URIs for names and wikipedia
articles[1]. It would be interesting to find out if the project has been
replicated elsewhere, but what is fascinating to me is that the sloppy
presentation layer can sometimes help feed the XML, JSON, or whatever,
application-friendly rendition rather than it always being the other way
around. The work done with producing RDF out of wikipedia is an example of
this[2]. The notion of replacing MARC with web pages would definitely be a
limiting way to frame the dynamic of web interactions with library data,
but maybe the key is to think of the web as a bidirectional and fluid part
of the process rather than as a static endpoint.
art
---
1. http://lists.webjunction.org/wjlists/web4lib/2005-August/038136.html
2. http://dbpedia.org/docs/
Received on Tue May 15 2007 - 12:04:47 EDT