[Developers] Casting ISBN-10 to ISBN-13

[Brian Karlak]

On Feb 12, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Richard Newman wrote:

>  The problems
> here are with user perception (particularly in search, where a user
> has their own perception of what an ISBN is) and ontological nicety
> (tied to user perception: can an old book's ISBN change years after
> publication?), rather than the name of the property per se.

I think changing the name to ISBN-13 would be the best thing we could  
do to mitigate any user perception problems.  Names act as implicit  
documentation and guide user expectations.

As part of this cleanup, we're going to have to migrate the property  
anyway.  Renaming it at the same time will be easy (if it's the right  
thing to do).

However, I'm not sure we gain anything by chaning the key to /book/ 
book_edition/ISBN13.  This will break any apps that use this property,  
so I'd vote to just change the property name.

> An alternative would be to spot 10-digit (possibly hyphenated) numbers
> with correct check digits in the UI, and seamlessly convert at query
> time, but that's a tradeoff between complexity and additional data
> that only you MW folks can make.

I'm not sure this would be appropriate to hardcode into the main  
freebase client, as it's very domain-specific.

However, it's a perfect application for ACRE.  I whipped up a simple  
ISBN-10 search app, you can check it out here:

	http://isbn.zenkat.user.dev.freebaseapps.com/

A little work and this could be turned into a standard service ...

Anyways, thanks for all your feedback -- it's much appreciated.

Brian