[Developers] Casting ISBN-10 to ISBN-13

[Brian Karlak]

On Feb 11, 2009, at 1:52 PM, Richard Newman wrote:

> If you regard the ISBN as being an attribute shared by instances of
> the edition, then I'd suggest having separate ISBN-10 and ISBN-13
> properties, because you want to preserve the value printed on the
> book. A user searching by the number on the book won't know to
> translate their ISBN-10 to ISBN-13; a book with both fields printed on
> the dust jacket (despite a well-documented 1-1 mapping) should perhaps
> have both properties.

We had discussed implementing both ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 links.  Beyond  
the extra space requirements needed to store equivalent information  
(which is significant when you consider the number of editions in  
freebase), my personal feeling is that dual properties will make the  
schema more complicated to use.  Applications will now have to search  
two fields instead of one.  Users entering data would need to make  
sure they used the proper field.

Since the code to do ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 conversion (and vice-versa) is  
relatively straightforward, doesn't it make more sense to have a  
single standardized field that we can rely on?  For instance, it I  
could a very simple ACRE app that would do the necessary conversion to  
do the proper freebase lookup.

Brian