Benoit St-Pierre wrote:
Hi!
> When trying to maintain a huge database (something akin to
> a master game repository), I encounter an annoying
> problem. Doublechecking names easily lead to a nightmare
> : I have to choose some name of a player without knowing
> exactly who to pick. Szabo, for instance, seems to be a
> popular name for a chessplayer.
It is. It is just a popular name anyway. VIAF lists 827
persons of that name. And VIAF is only built for persons who
published some book or the like...
> So I got this idea : why not use a filename of tournaments
> ? Ideally, this file would contain the list of all its
> players. Doublechecking names should get easier, then.
What you suggest would be to build up a database of all
tournaments and their participants.
> Besides, once the historical work has been done,
This will be a historical work, indeed.
> it would be independant of any database. Since
> collections of games are no real database
Eh? Why is a collection of games no real database? Do you
mean in the IBM sense? (DB2 is a real database, Access not.)
BTW: I'd surely collect those metadata in a real database.
> (i.e. the instances are devoid of any rigid designator, a
> unique ID, say), we need to work around this limitation.
> Working outside the database seems to me the only way to
> go, if we want a historical record of actual games, with
> less and less data error.
Well, working within a central database would be in fact the
only way to go. But you suggest to build up an authority
file (or registry if you prefer that naming) for all chess
games of the world. Even if you just start out with
important tournaments of the past and work through them,
this is a huge effort.
> Of course, if one has not enough information about a game,
> that solution can't help.
Right.
> But I don't see any solution to the lack of information,
> except trying to build a tournament file that would be
> orthogonal to a file of chessplayers' names.
Acutally, the real solution would be something like VIAF.
There you build up an authority file based upon the
publications of a person. For your project you'd build up
the authority file containing tournaments and persons based
upon the games of chess they played. Its very similar (just
to avoid the word "identical ;)
Still, you miss a point here: you'll have to individualize
the players and the games. You'd have to end up at an
authority record for each tournament connected to the
authority records of each participating player and all that
would be connected to the actual games being the backend of
the whole thing.
> That's just food for thought, of course. I thought you
> might like it, so here it is. I also thought it was a
> good idea to share.
It is a good idea, but it is a huge effort. Have a look at
VIAF's record for Garry Kasparov e.g.
http://viaf.org/24621810
You might want to unfold the MARC-21 section, check out the
400's and 700's, just to get an idea about the spellings for
his name. And just to get a vague idea about the size of the
project you might just call up http://viaf.org to see who is
participating in this game. And it's only about the
names part... (Plus using databases of books we already have
in huge databases built by autopsy using trained personel.
Creating such a catalogue record for one book from scratch
takes about 15min on the average.)
> PS: I am on vacations until end of July, so I won't
> contribute to the debate, if there is one. There should :
> Alex being for, Pascal seeing technical problems and no
> real relevance, etc. ;-)
Debate is over. I know that I'm right and I've quite some
forces behind me. ;) LoC, BNB, DNB, BNF (just to name the
really big ones) can't be wrong.
Still I see the difficulty to get it done in a spare time
project. I see a possibility to gradually work in linkages
to VIAF.
Franz: getting VIAF record IDs into the spelling file is the
way to go to get linkage up into Wikipedia and whatever.
VIAF-ID is persistend, of course. (Try to search for
118721097 at de.wikipedia.org. :) At the moment they use
PND-IDs as german wikipedia mainly set this up with DNB but
thats about to change and they go for VIAF-IDs (there's a
1:1 mapping PND <-> VIAF) plus if I got them right this
should start to spread out over the whole wikipedia.
Wikipedia wants to reuse as much data from authority files
as possible. Guess why ;) The national libraries are
currently investigating if they could use data from
Wikipedia to enrich their authority files. There was just
recently a talk about this issue at the Bibliothekartag in
Erfurt.
--
Kind regards, / War is Peace.
| Freedom is Slavery.
Alexander Wagner | Ignorance is Strength.
|
| Theory : G. Orwell, "1984"
/ In practice: USA, since 2001
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