Hickey on Melvyl and decision tables
On Thursday Thom Hickey (of OCLC) commented on how the Melvyl Recommender Project handles FRBRization, which I mentioned in this post. The Melvyl people use scoring to decide when two things are really the same work (so many points for matching titles exactly, so many for matching authors exactly, etc.) but Hickey recommends using a decision table. He does one to describe how the Melvyl thing works:
Titles E E E - P P P Authors P E - E E P P Idents - - E E - - P Dates P - E E P E - Here’s how to use the table. For each of the rows, you decide whether the records have an Exact, Partial, or no match. These are ordered, so a P in the table means that value has to be at least a partial match. The first column then says that if you have an Exact title match, and at least Partial author and date match, then your records match. The hyphen in the Idents row means that for this column it doesn’t matter how well the identifiers match. The last column shows that partial matches on all but dates result in a match, whether dates match or not. In order to match two records they have to satisfy at least one column.
Interesting and useful.