On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 5:40 PM, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> Agreed. But the SKOS headings put out in id.loc.gov lack this subfield information, and is exactly the point that I (and I think Karen) were trying to make. If the subfields were in there, we would have no problem at all, but as it is, while we might be able to break the strings at the hyphens, we could not recreate the semantics, i.e. the subfields v,w,x,z. At least, not without a lot of work.
>
But the SKOS has not replaced the MARC. The prefLabel is just that, a
human readable label. Our machines should not be trying to bust it
apart and infer meaning in it, since that's the whole point of the
URI.
You would instead be adding other assertions to the URI (probably
through a secondary vocabulary, I suppose, since SKOS can only deal
with NT/BT/RT) to which you can layer in the complexities of LCSH.
This way, anybody (library and, more importantly, non-library
applications) can use the URIs. People who don't understand or care
about the stuff we apparently can't figure out very well /ourselves/,
will have SKOS and a pretty simple thesaurus of related concepts.
Libraries, armed with knowledge of this other, LCSH-specific
vocabulary (I don't know of any other data-structures that mimic LCSH)
will have the URIs, the SKOS for the obvious relationships and the
LCSH thing for the less so (although, possibly more machine usable
than they /ever/ have been).
Everybody wins.
-Ross.
Received on Mon May 18 2009 - 21:06:31 EDT