[osis-core] osisWork regex problem

[Steve DeRose]

At 01:40 PM -0400 08/21/02, Harry Plantinga wrote:
>Chris,
>
>I thought about authorID.bookID, but to me that seemed
>to imply hierarchy and I thought that was a bad thing.
>I think I was confusing workIDs and reference system
>IDs, so that using augustine.confessions and
>augustine.enchiridion would imply that at some level
>both works use compatible reference systems.
>
>If we clearly distinguish between work identifiers and
>reference system identifiers, I could go either way.
>The hierarchy does make some sense.

There is an issue of whether we should have a conventional or 
required way of separating author and title; whether we want to say 
anything about name forms (like surname/given name order, treatment 
of titles, etc), case distinctions, etc.

That might be a useful separate spec. Easiest solution for most cases 
would be to use some library's author authority list. I presume they 
include authority entries for the ancients. Let me check with some 
librarian friends....

<pause duration="15m"/>

Apparently there are *lots* of authority lists. Several departments 
of LC have their own (archives, cataloging, etc), and there is no 
standardized format, no single character set, no synchronization. The 
good news is that they *do* include entries for the ancients.

Hmmmm, if we did an authority list declaration schema well, it could 
conceivably catch on. There are some interesting problems, such as:

* Multiple authors with the same name (of course)

* Pseudonyms assigned to different people at different times (such as 
the ostensible authors of long-running series like Hardy Boys, Tom 
Swift, etc).

* Multiple forms of name for a single person

* The usual character set issues

* Complicated name structures for sorting; authors like "The Widow 
and Heirs of Sir Todd of Tillinghast, 3rd Earl of

And so on. Still, doesn't sound all that bad.
-- 

Steve DeRose -- http://www.stg.brown.edu/~sjd
Chair, Bible Technologies Group -- http://www.bibletechnologies.net
Email: sderose@speakeasy.net
Backup email: sjd@stg.brown.edu