The Great War occurred again during a session at the #lodlam Summit in Sydney that was held in the Mitchell Library and hosted by the State Library of New South Wales.
One of our conversation turned on the use of a global subject identifier for the Great War since most systems still represent it as a series of strings: "The Great War, Great War (1914-1918), World War One, WW1, etc... Furthermore, different nations entered the conflict at different times (The United States entered the war in 1917) which implies that the event is seen as matching or not different views of the event, e.g.: Great War (1914-1918) versus Great War (1917-1918).
To get around this we created a global URI for any and all aspects of the Great War:
The term contains labels in several languages that we will keep adding on to and the human-readable term definition is "Any data related to the Great War" which should be wide enough for all usage. You don't need to agree with this definition: through the use of OWL, OWL2 and SKOS vocabularies you can further refine your own collection subject heading by linking to the above URL. The linking aspect is what will enable more people to find you collection and its holdings.
So, if you have a collection or items that are about anything related to the Great War, do:
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Use the term directly as a subject heading, OR:
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owl:sameAs's to it with your own subject heading, OR:
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owl:differentFrom to it if you disagree with how we are going about this, OR:
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skos:exactMatch to it if you live in the SKOS world and agree with the term, OR:
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skos:closeMatch to it if you live in the SKOS world and the term is close to what you think the Great War should be, OR:
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skos:broadMatch to it if you live in the SKOS world and the term is too broad for your needs, OR:
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rdf:subClass to it if you live in the OWL/RDF world and the term is too broad for your needs, BUT:
Do link to the term if you are working on the Great War. Linking is the only way we are going to get Linked Open Data working for everybody.
