Karen Coyle wrote:
>
> Using Jonathan's examples:
>
> ?Cookery, Indic?
> ?Absurd (Philosophy) in literature?
> ?Teachers of gifted children?
>
> All of these seem to me to be perfectly good concepts, even if not
> easily "facetable".
Sure, they're perfectly good concepts. They're just "compound" rather
than "simple" concepts, in Thesaural thinking.
Cookery, Indic is compounded of "Cookery" (or "Cooking") and "Indic" (or
"Indian").
Absurd (Philosophy) in literature is compounded of "absurd
(philosophy)" and "literature".
Teachers of gifted children is compounded of "Teachers" and "gifted
children" (and depending on how you want to do it, "gifted children" is
possibly compounded too).
"Cookery--India--Assam." is also a perfectly good concept, it's just a
compound one.
So if you want to get rid of the compound concepts, dividing on the --
dividers is not sufficient, is all I'm saying. But it's still
worthwhile, to the extent that if there's an authority record for every
individual LCSH term, that's a lot easier for software to work with.
But I'm still curious as to what types of terms (without --) exist
without authority records now; I think most or even possibly all of them
already do have authorities?
[ Incidentally, I can't tell you the difference between "Cookery,
Indic", "Cookery, Indian", and "Cookery--Indian--[place]". All appear in
authorities.loc.gov. LCSH is weird. Also both "Cookery, Indic--Calcutta
style.", as opposed to "Cookery--Indian--Calcutta". Ooh, and then we've
got "Cookery, Indic--India--Delhi." (authorized) AND
"Cookery--India--Delhi." (also authorized). Maybe someone can explain
this, but not me. ]
Jonathan
> That doesn't mean that a faceted form of the same
> concept couldn't be developed that is equivalent and could be linked
> to the LCSH heading. The question is whether the concept itself is
> useful for linking.
>
> The purpose that I see to linking to LCSH headings is to be able to
> link library bibliographic records to topics, persons, places, events,
> in the linked data world. It *isn't* about using LCSH's preferred
> terminology. I would think that we would want to connect LCSH to
> concepts in Wikipedia and DBpedia, for example.
>
> The potential is that we could add any number of "altLabels" to the
> identified concepts, including labels in languages other than English,
> and create a more usable set of identified concepts, all pointing to
> the same identifier. That would, however, require that LCSH allow for
> user input, etc. Since LCSH must adhere to the LC standard, and not
> veer off into untrammeled semantic exploration, we might want to
> consider doing so in another environment, perhaps Ross's version. As
> long as we tie everything back to the LC identifier, we should be able
> to provide the needed stability of reference.
>
> kc
>
>
Received on Mon Nov 16 2009 - 12:25:45 EST