[Data-modeling] Genres

[Iain Sproat]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds like the majority believe genre and subject should be disjoint,
> rather than subsets, per the dictionary definition.  I'm not sure it
> eliminates the query problem that Brian highlighted, but if there's a
> clear separation, I'm cool with letting folks try to enforce it.

It would be easy to enforce if genre was made an enumerated type.

Iain

>
> Tom
>
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Brian Karlak <zenkat at metaweb.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 13, 2009, at 10:48 AM, Kirrily Robert wrote:
>>
>> We've had various discussions about what makes a subject and what
>> makes a genre for books/film/games/etc.  I was just pondering it and
>> two possible definitions of genre occurred to me that I wanted to
>> share and ask opinions on:
>>
>> 1) an established segmentation for the purposes of marketing
>> 2) a group of works which share tropes and have a similar creative
>> vocabulary
>>
>> Speaking specifically of books, the Library of Congress has a very clear and
>> strict distinction between genres and subjects.  In LOC-land, a genre is a
>> very high-level description of the literary composition of the work, such
>> as:
>>
>> novel
>> essay
>> biography
>> short story
>>
>> There is a controlled, enumerated list of 92 accepted genres for LOC MARC
>> records which have been compiled from various libraries and other sources of
>> bibliographic information available at:
>> http://www.loc.gov/marc/sourcecode/genre/genrelist.html .
>> You'll note that the LOC's genre list doesn't even include items like
>> "science fiction".  Instead, that's considered a subject in LOC-land, along
>> with vampires, zombies, and the like.  The list of subjects, as one might
>> imagine, is quite a bit larger than the genre list: currently the LOC's
>> Subject Authority contains 365,698 records, carefully curated in a tree of
>> broader and narrower terms.  It's available for searching and downloading
>> online at:
>> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/
>> It's a highly-curated, public-domain data set.  According to the LOC, it's
>> been maintained since 1898 and is considered "the only subject headings list
>> accepted as the worldwide standard."
>> Oh, and did I mention that curated subject headings are also the LOC's first
>> foray into the world of linked data?  Pretty cool -- and very Freebase.
>> Brian
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