Hiya,
> And wouldn't it be great if that was the case?
James Weinheimer <weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> The answer is decidedly no.
Hehe, I was reading through your answer and then I figure that you
were talking about the scenario if people used these resolvable
identifiers now instead of other things. No, no, of course people
wouldn't use them, not then nor now; they're mostly rubbish,
satisfying very little, even if they probably could work just fine for
strict identity markers.
In a sort of roundabout way I was talking about how it would be great
to have the library namespace there instead of any other, playing with
the utopian dream that the library world actually had something
marvelous to present there (even if, in a strict way, for Linked Data
and semantic web and web ontology work it doesn't actually need to
resolve to anything useful; that's an added bonus).
When people should look up some question they just asked you, and what
do you tell them? "Google it." It would be great to have ontologists
and systemics say "IdLib it" in the same way to questions of
identifier markers. That's the lost opportunity.
> I want it clear that I am *not* saying that some kind of tool should not be
> built, because it definitely should be built
I'm not so sure anymore. Building a tool like that requires library
land to get together and agree to its importance (a rather large
hurdle) as well as paying for its maintenance. I see libraries across
nations agree to some basic library values (access, collections,
buildings) but as soon as it gets abstract, not so much (FRBR, RDA,
models, ontologies, knowledge management, usability, openness of data
and meta data, collaborations within and outside of library land, and
so on).
> but we must look at it through
> the eyes of the person consuming it.
Well, the consumers of persistent global identifiers are often
technical people that libraries never have catered to in the past, and
I doubt they can cater to in the future, at least not without some
larger shift in thinking which I don't think is going to happen.
> This is why I say that linked data *may*
> create something useful for the public, but it just as well confuse them
> more than ever.
Linked Data makes it somewhat simpler for libraries to share what
they've got at the time a spider collects the data, but after that
they have no control of what happens to the data, no control over
edits, no control over reuse, and I suspect most librarians hate that
thought?
regards,
Alex
Received on Mon Oct 14 2013 - 00:54:55 EDT