Am 06.12.2010 11:35, schrieb Weinheimer Jim:
A URI does not have to be a number--it is *any character string* that
identifies a resource uniquely,
Yes. My emphasis was not supposed to be on "number" but on the
neutrality of the character string! Apart from the term itself,
something like http://id.loc.gov is not sufficiently neutral to be
safe from future changes, but it maybe added today to the number or
string we have now in our catalogs. But not added in the data, just in
displays, by OPAC software or service software, just in time! In which
way it is easy to change without touching the records at all.
And (alphanumeric) "numbers" are language-neutral, don't overlook that,
LCSH or name headings strings are not. The usefulness of VIAF depends
a lot on its being language-neutral and as switchboard between
different vernacular names or terms. Of course, there should exist
a service like
http://viaf.org/lcsh=Neo-Confucianism&lang=ger
that would return the German equivalent. And another option to return
the number for the term or the term for the number ...
(It can't be as easy as that, for many German subject terms,
unfortunately, but that's another topic.)
But anyway, to have URIs or bare numbers in records instead of textual
strings, makes your depend on external resources. Think twice about
that. Ideally, an OPAC software might fall back on the textual string
contained in the record in cases where the service fails that is used
to replace the IdNumber be the current string stored elsewhere. There is
of course the vision that ideally all records should be dispersed into
n+1 statements floating around in clouds all over the net, to be
assembled then, just in time, in just the right way, at the point of
need. For the moment, and if reliability is of any concern, that's a
pie in the sky.
B.Eversberg
