There have been several comments on yesterdays post about WorldCat Identities. Here are some reactions to the comments:
Ed Summers asked about 'cool' URLs. We plan on having more straight-forward URLs in the future, but haven't worked out the details yet. The current URLs are SRU search requests using the NACO normalized version of the name and should be stable, or at least as stable as the Web site and form of the name is.
Roy Tennant wondered why J. K. Rowling didn't make the top 100 cloud. For the cloud I computed a score of number of manifestations associated with the name plus the square root of holdings associated with those records. The 100th entry (David A. Adler) had a score of 157,414, while J. K. Rowling was 402'd with a score of 78,595. It's probably worth noting that the holdings count is the number of libraries that have said they have the item, not the number of copies that they have.
Roy also found a way to make the search misbehave. We'll be fixing that soon.
--Th
Thom, it was actually "P. Melanchthon" who asked about J.K. Rowling, but no matter. Thanks for the upcoming fix. I really hate to have non-programmers see obtuse Java error messages. Come to think of it, I hate them for anyone. ;-)
Posted by: Roy Tennant | February 14, 2007 at 13:24
+1 on the request for cool URLs (that can be used as identifiers).
Posted by: Bruce | February 14, 2007 at 16:24
Hello - I think Worldcat Identities is a great idea. I am wondering whether entries are updated automatically as Worldcat bibs are updated. Like if an author has two entries in Worldcat now, and another title by that author is added tomorrow, will it automatically be added to the author's Worldcat Identity entry at some point?
Response: Sorry, for now we are working with a copy of WorldCat pulled at the beginning of 2007. Typically we update our research copy twice a year, so any WorldCat changes probably won't show up until July. --Th
Posted by: Cynthia J. Rogers | February 16, 2007 at 14:23
Is there a 1-to-1 relationship between WorldCat Identities and LoC authority records? The former is obviously much richer so why using the latter at all in the future? ;-) The authority link of Harry Potter seems to be wrong, but I am not that familiar with LoC authorities. I have been waiting for available results of VIAF for about 2 years - could you add links to the PND record where available (for instance http://dispatch.opac.d-nb.de/DB=4.1/PPN?PPN=118802976
or http://dispatch.opac.d-nb.de/DB=4.1/REL?PPN=118802976 at Alan Turing)? Currently WorldCat and WorldCat Identities is nice but too US-centered for a real worldwide use. You should think about Microformats (they will be supported in FireFox 3.0) or some other way to better distribute the Identity data so it can be used in the Semantic Web and for MashUps that may also better fit for the need of non US-users. Nice work and greetings!
Response: The Harry Potter link is a 'known problem' and we'll be fixing it soon. Adding the PND links is a good idea, and is on our list of things to do. We don't have any specific plans for microformats right now, but are open to suggestions. We probably should be supporting COINS at least.
I'll do a posting about the relationship between the pages and the NACO authority file.
--Th
Posted by: Jakob | February 25, 2007 at 20:30