Weinheimer Jim wrote:
I have followed the VIAF for some time and applaud the general direction. This is the sort of project that should be given high priority since true exchange of this type of information can lead to genuine cooperation and a real savings in time and money for users as well as for libraries. It would also be one of the most important advances toward the Semantic Web, which could raise our profile significantly. There was another project called "Onesac" in Denmark that I consulted with briefly. If was all in RDF(!!!), had authority records from all over Europe and was extremely advanced. It seems to have died, however. http://www.portia.dk/websites/onesac.htm
Interesting though this looks, one wonders what became of it. Project ran until 2005 - but is there a final report? At least one would like to read what can be learnt from it. VIAF has an impressive web presence at OCLC, but even there, it is difficult to find anything about the state of the project, and esp., about impending new stages or problems they might have run into.
The example you point out should be eminently fixable although I don't know how it would work now: finding references of references. Using URIs can be done in a whole variety of ways. Using URIs is not that much different from how relational databases work today ...
What exactly do you want to say here? Do you really mean relational databases? I see this term frequently used erroneously instead of "entity-relationship" databases. The word "relational" in RDBS does precisely not say that the database cares about relations between objects or entities. The term was created by mathematicians who developed the first models. For them, a "relation" was just a mathematical term taken from set theory and meaning a subset of a table. B.E.
