[open-bibliography] concrete things and works

[William Waites]

Just to elaborate a bit on something that came up in
the call today. Keeping in mind some thoughts
expressed on the LLD list last week [1] which are 
salient.

Tatiana wants a way to link together different books
into some thing like a "Work", expressing the difference
between myriad editions of "War and Peace" and the
platonic ideal of the work "War and Peace".

I think it is too early to do this. We still don't
have all the plumbing that we need in order to manage
individual items, we have yet to import more varied
datasets, basic things like user account management,
creating and editing entries really do need to be
done first.

Talking about things on a more abstract level is 
hard. Put vaguely, we all might agree that there is
such a thing as a Work, but looking closer it isn't
at all clear that we are agreeing on the same thing.
Librarians have a well developed set of cataloging
rules that tell them when something is a new work
and when it is not. These rules may or may not map
cleanly to the way an art historian or musicologist
thinks of such things. When do we have a derived 
work? The intellectual property lawyers probably have
yet different ideas. If we have translations are these
new, derived works? Librarians might say no, lawyers
would likely say yes.

So this is where things get interesting. How do we
erect a conceptual superstructure on top of these 
concrete things that we have? Can we allow for 
alternative conceptual superstructures? Particularly
how does this affect searching and browsing (and 
here is the relevance of FRBR understood as functional
requirements not as a set of classes and rules)?

Our interest in the public domain necessarily means
that we cannot take a strictly library science point
of view since we seek to provide answers to what are
fundamentally legal questions. But we don't want to
make something that would be unrecognisable to a 
librarian.

So we should think about these things, but definitely
not rush forward with implementation especially as
there are many much simpler things, proverbial low-
hanging fruit, that need doing.

Cheers,
-w

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2011Mar/0129.html
-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
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