Don't take the following as suggesting I'm against such an idea, just
a few thoughts about how I'd like it to work.
Most of our systems require significant pre-coordination and absolute
relationships, but the web (and much of its success) stands in
contrast to that.
Google could have been built by requiring all websites to register
their content and report their links, but it wasn't. And I think we'd
all agree that it wouldn't work as well if it was.
The library world is smaller, so it's somewhat less fantastic to
expect that type of relationship here, but still I think there's
something to be learned from the loose relationships found on the web.
It's harder to describe how such systems might work, but the web
teaches us that it's easier to implement and build on systems that
allow loose relationships than those that demand strict compliance.
What I'm really arguing for is leveraging what we've already got:
we're publishing our catalogs to the web, so let's make sure we're
putting them out there with good semantic markup so it's easy to
parse the data out of them. That way we could build spiders that
harvest that data from all those decentralized catalogs.
What we do with it from there is another matter, but here's the big
win: the architecture allows us to try lots of things in parallel,
each making our own decisions about how to use it. That's important,
because it will take us a while to make sense of our theories of how
this does or should work, and it'll allow us to evolve more
organically than with a centralized database.
--Casey
On May 16, 2007, at 7:56 PM, Corey A Harper wrote:
> Imagine if OCLC's database were built around this principle, and a
> nightly SPARQL query could retrieve any statement Doug made about a
> resource when he added a field or subfield, and add it to the data-
> pool
> of a local catalog. Imagine then that another query could pull in the
> tags that Bob added to Library Thing and the reviews Sarah posted
> on Amazon.
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://MaisonBisson.com/blog/
ph: 603-535-2256
Received on Wed May 16 2007 - 20:05:10 EDT