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.
A slug is the semantic, human-readable portion of a URL, typically appended after the domain name and path to represent the specific identity of a resource or page within a web system, often derived from the title of the content it identifies; for example, in the URL https://lib.jjay.cuny.edu/citing_sources, the term citing_sources is the slug—automatically or manually generated by the content management system (CMS)—that acts as an identifier within a hierarchy, separating pages like /apa7 or /mla9, allowing the site to dynamically retrieve content from a database or file system; unlike full URLs, slugs are often editable and indexable, optimised for search engine visibility and readability, and crucially they are contextual: a slug has meaning only in relation to its parent directory or domain structure, much like how a chapter title depends on its book; modern CMSs like WordPress, Drupal, or LibGuides (used by many academic libraries) treat slugs as modular nodes of information architecture, enabling clean, persistent links that communicate the nature of the page without query strings or session IDs, and in citation practice, the slug is not referenced alone, but its presence ensures traceable citation stability, for instance when linking to specific guides such as /mla9 or /quoting_sources under the John Jay Library site, ensuring students and researchers can reference exact locations within evolving digital ecosystems; ultimately, the slug is not merely URL decor, but a lexical token that anchors structure, metadata and navigability within web publishing infrastructures. A Slug Is Not a Snail.