[open-bibliography] New BNB sample data available

Karen Coyle kcoyle at kcoyle.net
Sun Feb 6 16:01:34 UTC 2011


Quoting Simon Spero <sesuncedu at gmail.com>:


> In regards to the requirement that preflabel must be unique within a scheme,
> this is an essential property of controlled vocabularies (ambiguity
> control).  See e.g. NISO Z39.19 section 5.3.1 (not sure what the paragraph
> number is in 2788, but it's roughly the same wording).
>
> It's been LC policy since 1876 :-) [Cutter rule # 173].

Right, but the context of that rule is a thesaurus or controlled  
vocabulary in which the "prefLabel" *is* the identifier for the  
"thing." There were no URIs in 1876. FRAD continues this by  
essentially having two identifiers -- one for machines (URI) and one  
for humans (prefLabel). This makes sense, to some degree, because you  
do want to communicate unambiguously to both machines and humans, but  
I'm not totally convinced that prefLabel is the way to do that, since  
different communities are likely to favor different prefLabels. (Think  
of the difference between MeSH subject headings and LCSH subject  
headings for the same thing.) Communicating to humans unambiguously is  
devilishly hard, as we know.

kc

>
> Simon
> p.s.
> Amusingly, Z39.19 uses the term polyseme polysemously to mean homonym.
> Lexical semantics meta!
> On Feb 6, 2011 8:57 AM, "Antoine Isaac" <aisaac at few.vu.nl> wrote:
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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m: 1-510-435-8234
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