Re: [libdb-develop] xISBN

[Morbus I. <mo...@di...>]

>I thought this was kind of a neat service:
>http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/xisbn/

Yeah, I had first read of this from Udell a month or so back:

  http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/11/13.html

It is useful to LibDB, but I'm not entirely sure how just yet. The
ISBN's are certainly helpful: LibDB can be configured with an unlimited
number of identifiers per entity, and will ship with at least the
following (from the schema):

  "Artisan Home Entertainment Cat. No."
   "The Artisan Home Entertainment Catalog Number
   is displayed in the UPC box of their DVD purchases."

  "ASIN",
    "ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. Almost
    every product on our site has its own ASIN -- a unique code we use
    to identify it. For books, the ASIN is the same as the ISBN number,
    but for all other products a new ASIN is created when the item
    is uploaded to our catalogue."

  "IMDb"
    "The Internet Movie Database uses a nine-digit string to
    identify its resources; the first two characters determine
    whether it's a movie title or person's name."

  "ISSN"
    "The ISSN \(International Standard Serial Number\) is an
    eight-digit number which identifies periodical publications
    as such, including electronic serials. More than one million
    ISSN numbers have so far been assigned."

  "ISBN"
    "The ISBN is a unique machine-readable identification number,
    which marks any book unmistakably. For 30 years the ISBN has
    revolutionized the international book-trade. 159 countries
    and territories are officially ISBN members."

  "LCCN"
    "The Library of Congress began to print catalog cards in 1898
    and began to distribute them in 1901. The Library of Congress
    Card Number was the number used to identify and control
    catalog cards."

And here's an example (shortened for brevity) of THE POOL's identifiers:

 THE POOL (expression), IMDB: "tt0283027"
 THE POOL (dvd manifestation), ASIN: "B00006FD94"
 THE POOL (dvd manifestation), Artisan: "12997"

I've also been meaning to add UPC identifiers as a default as well,
since http://www.upcdatabase.com/ is a handy collection of them
(which does contain THE POOL's DVD UPC, although my book SPIDERING
HACKs had a different UPC than what I expected. Haven't investigated
that one yet).

As for the XISBN utility, it will certainly allow us to suck down
more information about other manifestations (and possibly, expressions),
but a human would have to be around to manually say "yeah, this ISBN
is an expression, and oop, this one is a manifestation of this
European printing", etc.).

Programmatically, at most I'd be able to say "all these matching
ISBN numbers from XISBN are related, somehow, to the FRBR work".
The relationships would be revised more stringently when more
information became available to the human cataloger.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( if i could change the future, i'd change the past instead )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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