Manolis Peponakis advances a decisive critique of bibliographic modelling by arguing that the Entity–Relationship (ER) paradigm underpinning FRBR, FRAD, and indirectly RDA is structurally inadequate for the demands of Semantic Web environments. His central contention is that ER’s rigid distinction between entities, attributes, and relationships inhibits machine-processable expressiveness because attributes remain terminal descriptors rather than relationally operative nodes. This limitation becomes especially acute in cataloguing contexts where repeated literals—such as “London” as birthplace, publisher location, subject, and place of publication—cannot be explicitly linked as the same referent. Peponakis proposes RDF as a superior alternative because its triple-based logic promotes such attributes into URI-governed entities, enabling a coherent graph in which one place node may sustain multiple semantic relations and disambiguate identity across contexts. The article’s most original intervention lies in its reconceptualisation of names through the notion of nomen: names are not mere strings nor inert access points, but socio-culturally meaningful entities requiring their own ontological status. By elevating every appellation to an RDF node, Peponakis dissolves the inherited separation between descriptive metadata and authority control, replacing static record logic with a dynamic network in which entities, names, and resources are explicitly interlinked. The diagrams on pages 11–13 are especially illustrative, demonstrating how places, personal names, and titles become relational clusters rather than isolated textual fields. The broader implication is profound: catalogues should no longer be conceived as bounded records but as adaptive semantic graphs, capable of multiple visualisations, linguistic flexibility, and computational inference. Peponakis thus redefines bibliographic description as a form of knowledge modelling, wherein descriptive information itself becomes an access point and naming becomes both the epistemic and technical hinge of the catalogue. Harvard citation: Peponakis, M. (2016) ‘In the Name of the Name: RDF Literals, ER Attributes, and the Potential to Rethink the Structures and Visualizations of Catalogs’, Information Technology and Libraries, 35(2), pp. 19–38. doi:10.6017/ital.v35i2.8749.
