Authority Schema: Was: Re: [osis-core] osisWork regex problem

Patrick Durusau osis-core@bibletechnologieswg.org
Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:38:14 -0400


Steve,

Sounds like a plan to me!

Calendaring: I have marked 3 September as the start date for the 
authority spec. I will circulate a reminder so we can start gathering 
requirements and resources at that point.

Suggestion: Since Harry Plantinga has better bibliographic skills than 
anyone on this list, we need to draft him to oversee the requirements 
and resource gathering. ;-) Sound like a plan to you, Harry?

Patrick

Steve DeRose wrote:

> 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.


-- 
Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu