[open-bibliography] OKFN blog: Bibliographica, an Introduction

Sun May 23 21:07:08 UTC 2010

On 10-05-23 18:23, Karen Coyle wrote:

Hi kc.

> I took a quick look at some of the data, and there are what I would
> consider some errors that should be corrected. As an example, FRBR
> "manifestation" is not a resource type -- but text is. (Any
> manifestation has inherent in it the two FRBR levels Work and
> Expression, so there really isn't any such thing as a Manifestation on
> its own.) 

I think you're absolutely right. Most of the data that's in there at the
moment -- and expect it to be trashed and re-done -- comes from the
Gutenberg MARC dump. As I understand it, what we typically find in MARC
files equates to a Manifestation (and some author/editor data). What we
haven't done yet is infer Expression and Work from the Manifestation.
Looking at the literature a bit it seems like this is a bit problematic;
I think WorldCat tried a few years ago and ended up suggesting that
Expression be removed and just add some extra data to Manifestation. In
any event the data in there are incomplete.

> Also note that IFLA has registered FRBR provisionally at
> http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/5.html. What it lacks at
> the moment is an official URI (they are quibbling about the domain
> name), but I can let you know when that happens. The IFLA version of
> FRBR in RDF should be considered the authoritative one.

Interesting. I wonder why they wouldn't just adopt the existing
namespace. Their URIs are also funny.

    :WarAndPace a <http://iflastandards.info/ns/fr/frbr/frbrer/1003>

regardless of namespace, it's not nice to give your classes numbers
instead of names.

In any event it's not a bit deal to use owl:sameAs (or equivalentClass)
and infer extra types to keep compatibility.

> Also, the Metadata Registry has RDF properties for hundreds of
> bibliographic fields. I could help identify the ones needed for
> Bibliographica if you'd like.

This would be most helpful. Have you read the bit in the documentation
about using "lenses" with the Fresnel vocabulary (like "views") for
visualisation? A lot of the work is going to be in creating those, and
they're used both for editing and viewing.

That said, we run into a hard problem here. This is not intended to be a
catalogue maintained by trained librarians but by researchers and
scholars in other fields. How much do we require them to understand the
FRBR conceptual model? For example, if they have just read Leopold
Auer's "Violin Playing as I Teach it" and want to make an annotation to
the effect that a particular chapter contains some good insight into the
expression of Bach's Chaconne, do they make this annotation in reference
to the Work, Expression, Manifestation? I suspect that for both subject
and object they would use the respective Work. I also suspect that they
would be wont to put it elsewhere and couldn't be bothered with
understanding FRBR's distinctions. On the other hand if someone want's
to say that X's translation into Estonian of "100 Years of Solitude" is
particularly bad, this type of statement goes at the Expression level.
But will they know that without help? I'm not sure how to handle this
sort of thing from a user interface perspective.

Cheers,
-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK