[Developers] Casting ISBN-10 to ISBN-13

[Ed Laurent]

As someone who's entered a few ISBN's by hand through the UI, I've been
confused as to whether I should enter the 10, 13 or online version of the
ISBN, often because the document doesn't say which one it's presenting and
requiring the member to count the number of numbers is probably too much to
ask to be honest. Also, there are 3 not 2 kinds of ISBN counting the online
ISBN that I've found on some documents. If the Freebase help for the
property was clear that the default was ISBN-13 but the 10 or online
versions were acceptable, then I would have no problem with this proposed
single ISBN property.

-Ed

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Brian Karlak <zenkat at metaweb.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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