Relations

This page is for discussion of use cases, requirements, etc. for expressing relations

Notes from August 21 discussion

Discussion:

• Are existing elements acceptable on their own for expressing some kind of machine-readable relationship?
• If not, what are the use cases for expressing machine-readable relationships?
• To what extent is EAD capable of providing machine-readable relationships currently, or need enhancements to do that, or is EAD designed for that purpose anyway?
• Should the activity of expressing machine-readable relationships be done within EAD? Or should it be a separate activity?
• Do we start to identifying core relationships (ones that are more important to start with)?
• Need to come out and say we’re not taking away the ability for people to write narrative finding aids

Use cases (do they lead to need for machine-readable)?

• Use cases are already baked into the motivation of description
• Finding aid and repository –it’s not an explicitly stated relationship in EAD – you can assume it; requires computer to make parsing decisions; not explicit in structure of EAD; can probably parse out the information and generate the relationship (as SNAC does), or can state it more explicitly; to parse it out, it requires very consistent data, and there may be too many assumptions to make
• I want to be able to have a mechanism by which I can consistently refer to all of the finding aids related to a single repository.
• You have an EAC record that you want to connect to a collection, and see all of the other records the creator is mentioned in
• Connecting finding aids together through related material
• Controlled access – relationship between a collection and topic in the collection

Problems/Limitations:

• No method to express type of relationship – EAD is limited in its expressiveness
• Even examples (such as ) in Tag Library show different kinds of data in the bibref

Outline:

Relationships we want to express:

1. Repository to materials/finding aid
2. Creator(s) to materials/finding aid
3. Finding aid to finding aid
4. Subjects (topics, genres, names) to materials/finding aid

What we need to do that requires those relationships to be expressed in a machine-readable way.

How it can or can’t be done in EAD.

How it could be done in EAD, without impinging on people’s ability to create narrative finding aids.