McGrath, Kelley C. wrote:
> It seems to me that Work records will only really be useful if they
> are a public good and available to everyone. Although Works don't
> really have inherent identifiers, theoretically, Work records could
> more easily have identifiers in the way that authority records do
> now. It may be that different groups will create different Work
> records which may have to be linked in some way, as the VIAF tries to
> do now for names.
Right. The only usable work identifiers that I know of are LibraryThing
Work identifiers and some Wikipedia articles about works - and this
identifiers work very well (if they exist for a given work)! For music
there is the International Standard Musical Work Code (ISWC) and
"uniform titles" could be used to some degree for mapping
manifestations. Instead of inventing your own work-identifier-system you
should just reuse existing efforts. Do you store LibraryThing work
identifiers in your catalog?
> So I am not sure how we could control Manifestations on a massive
> scale, especially in a distributed model rather than a centralized
> one. The best I could come up with is finding a way to say in a
> Manifestation record that this is a Manifestation record and then
> putting the Work identifier in the Manifestation record to say that
> this represents a Manifestation of or includes this Work. This does
> not completely resolve the problem as it would seem to be hard to
> manipulate the Manifestations if they don't have their own
> identifiers.
>
> Or perhaps we could create a centralized repository of Manifestations
> and records could be linked to that. Which is essentially what OCLC
> is trying to do now, but definitely not in a way that those numbers
> will become a public good.
>
> Or perhaps I'm just looking at this wrong?
There already is one distributed identifier system that can be used for
manifestations: it's the URI. Just use RDF to express that some given
URI identifies a manifestation and RDF properties to state which works
and expressions it is connected to:
properhttp://vocab.org/frbr/core.html#Expression
In addition you can harvest the Semantic Web for expressions that other
people have created. The rest only depends on nice interfaces that
people can use for to manage FRBR statements.
Cheers,
Jakob
--
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss_at_gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de
Received on Fri Nov 06 2009 - 04:07:45 EST