Ross, there's another problem. Many of the subheadings are themselves
members of controlled lists. Alternate terms for those subheadings are
given where the controlled list is defined. Without a separation into
the logical parts, there isn't a linked data way to associate the term
as used in the subject heading with the list from which it came.
I'll give some examples soon, but quite honestly I don't think that
treating the main heading and subheadings as an undifferentiated string
is going to give us what we need. Well, not what I think we need.
kc
Ross Singer wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Tue May 19 2009 - 09:42:01 EDT