Re: Slightly OT: MARC
Patrick Durusau <patrick-Q/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.text.xml.xtm.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Lars, On 7/19/2010 7:28 PM, Lars Heuer wrote: <snip> > Well, one question remains: Where are the subjects? Where are the > global identifiers? If there are no global identifiers, all attempts > to create a topic map from MARC are pretty useless. If neither ISBNs > nor any other global identifier are given, who could we assume that we > talk about the same subject? > > Shocking answer: There are *no* global identifiers. (In my opinion there never will be. People are just too imperfect for a variety of reasons to make that work.) What we can make work is using ISBNs, for example, for a rough cut on merging for the same subject, perhaps with some minimal check of other properties, author for example, and rely on human users to say when we got it wrong despite all our care. After all, when *one* user corrects it, then that correction percolates forward to benefit the next user. That is to say that unlike search engines that "do over" every search, a topic map can accumulate the insights of its users and grow more accurate over time. Our judgments about whether we are talking about the same subject is provisional. If the data is very, very clean (highly unusual) then some criteria will get us pretty close. If the data is less clean, then we will be farther away. But if we are using a topic map, then corrections are going to benefit other users down the line. ****** Whether we should create a topic map from MARC data, with or without the MARC metadata as first class subjects should not depend upon a mythic translation into a perfect topic map. Mappings are always going to have a certain degree of inaccuracy and so what we need to develop for topic maps is a well recognized notion of "correction" by users. Hope you are having a great evening! Patrick -- Patrick Durusau patrick-Q/[email protected] Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34 Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps) Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300 Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps) Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net Homepage: http://www.durusau.net Twitter: patrickDurusau