+1 Sharon M. Foster, 91.7% Librarian Speaker-to-Computers http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/
On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 10:37 PM, Bill Dueber <b...@dueber.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 10:26 AM, Mike Taylor <m...@indexdata.com> wrote: > >> I'm not sure what to make of this except to say that Yet Another XML >> Bibliographic Format is NOT the answer! >> > > I recognize that you're being flippant, and yet think there's an important > nugget in here. > > When you say it that way, it makes it sound as if folks are debating the > finer points of OAI-MARC vs MARC-XML -- that it's simply syntactic sugar > (although I'm certainly one to argue for the importance of syntactic sugar) > over the top of what we already have. > > What's actually being discussed, of course, is the underlying data model. > E-R pairs primarily analyzed by set theory, triples forming directed graphs, > whether or not links between data elements can themselves have attributes -- > these are all possible characteristics of the fundamental underpinning of a > data model to describe the data we're concerned with. > > The fact that they all have common XML representations is noise, and > referencing the currently-most-common xml schema for these things is just > convenient shorthand in a community that understands the exemplars. The fact > that many in the library community don't understand that syntax is not the > same as a data model is how we ended up with RDA. (Mike: I don't know your > stuff, but I seriously doubt you're among that group. I'm talkin' in > general, here.) > > Bibliographic data is astoundingly complex, and I believe wholeheartedly > that modeling it sufficiently is a very, very hard task. But no matter the > underlying model, we should still insist on starting with the basics that > computer science folks have been using for decades now: uids (and, these > days, guids) for the important attributes, separation of data and display, > definition of sufficient data types and reuse of those types whenever > possible, separation of identity and value, full normalization of data, zero > ambiguity in the relationship diagram as a fundamental tenet, and a rigorous > mathematical model to describe how it all fits together. > > This is hard stuff. But it's worth doing right. > > > > > -- > Bill Dueber > Library Systems Programmer > University of Michigan Library >