Subjects, sets and identifications was: Slightly OT: MARC

Greetings!

I wanted to pull together several items from the discussion. What you 
see below is also going to appear on my blog.

Subjects, Sets and Identifications

There was a lively discussion on the topicmapmail discussion list about 
books and whether they have any universal identifiers.

There are known problems with ISBNs, such as publishers re-using them or 
assigning duplicate ISBNs to different books or simply making mistakes 
with the numbers themselves.

It was reported by one participant that Amazon uses it own unique 
identifier for books.

The United States Library of Congress has its own internal identifier 
for books in its collection.

Not to mention that other library systems have their own identifiers for 
their collections.

At a minimum, it is possible for a book, considered as a subject, to 
have an ISBN, an identifier from Amazon, another identifier at the 
Library of Congress and still others in other systems. Perhaps even a 
unique identifier from a book jobber that sells books to libraries.

If you think about that for a moment, it become clear that a book as a 
subject has a *set* of identifiers, all of which identify the same 
subject. Moreover, each of those identifiers works best in a particular 
context, dare we say the identifier has a scope?

If I had a representative (a topic) for this subject (book) that had a 
set of identifiers (ISBN, ASIN, LOC, etc.) and each of those identifiers 
had a scope, I could reliably import information from any source that 
used at least one of those identifiers.

The originators of those identifiers can continue to use their 
identifiers and yet enjoy the benefits of information that was generated 
or collected using other identifiers.

Topic maps anyone?

******

Hope everyone is having a great day!

Patrick

PS: Appears as: Subjects, Sets and Identifications: 
http://tm.durusau.net/?p=1151

-- 
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