James Weinheimer wrote:
>
> I don't believer that is what I am saying. It's that the heading
> "Aeronautics, Military--Accidents--Italy, Northern--History" is a
> conglomeration of lots of concepts, and giving them all one URI doesn't seem
> to be the best solution.
>
But that heading has an authority record in LCSH. What you're really
critisizing is LCSH itself, rather than the SKOSified representation at
id.loc.gov. As long as that heading has an authority record in LCSH, I
am 100% positive that the right thing to do is to give it a URI in
SKOS. LCSH itself has already made the decision that "Aeronautics,
Military--Accidents--Italy, Northern--History" is indeed a single concept.
The fans of LCSH's specificity like this aspect of LCSH. They think it's
important that very specific things like that ("history of military
aeronatical accidents in Northern Italy") indeed have a specific
authorized heading/concept to represent them. Whether this is in fact
the best way to organize a controlled vocabulary for providing access to
bibliographic databases is debatable. But as long as LCSH works this
way, it needs to be represented in a semantic-webby skos-ified
represtantation.
The role of id.loc.gov is to reperesent LCSH as it actually is. And as
it actually is, indeed that specific pre-coordinated concept needs to be
represented.
But I'm sympathetic to your criticisms, which I read as critisicms of
the structure of LCSH itself, not of id.loc.gov.
Jonathan
Received on Tue May 19 2009 - 10:26:51 EDT