[openbiblio-dev] Metadata format for Bibliographica

Tue Mar 22 13:42:58 UTC 2011

Hello,

as I am searching for predicates to use to link bibliographic
descriptions and bibliographic resources to identifiers I also came
across http://open.vocab.org/terms/blid. Obviously the BNB number
identifies a record in the BL catalog[1]. As you chose OV:blid to be a
subproperty of bibo:identifier the predicate's domain is a
bibo:Document. This would only be correct if a catalog record is a
bibo:Document which I don't think is intended by Bibo. Also, the
statement

<http://bnb.bibliographica.org/entry/GB8514494> a bibo:Book,
        bibo:Document;
        OV:blid "011640760".

is wrong regarding that the BNB number doesn't identify the
bibliographic resource but a description of it.

As the distinction between entity and its description is important in
the Linked Data world I find it problematic to neglect it on this
level. Have you thought about hanging the BL number onto the
resource's description? Would you consider changing the use of this
predicate and its domain restriction?

I already posted a question to the bibo-list[2] as bibo has similar
problems but until now nobody answered. See also my question on
SemanticOverflow.[3]

Adrian

[1] http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/bnbstruct.html

[2] http://groups.google.com/group/bibliographic-ontology-specification-group/browse_thread/thread/baa3b0fbf7770488

[3] http://www.semanticoverflow.com/questions/3572/xsd-or-vocabulary

2011/3/17 William Waites <ww at styx.org>:
> Hello Primavera,
>
> There is no detailed specification. However we are using the
> bibo ontology for books/works simple dublin core for the main
> metadata and foaf for people, so an entry might look like this:
>
> <http://bibliographica.org/entry/abc123> a bibo:Book ;
>    dc:title "my first book of abcs";
>    dc:contributor <http://bibliographica/entity/def456>;
>    dc:publisher <http://bibliographica.org/entity/ghi789>;
>    dc:subject [ rdfs:label "letters";
>    bibo:isbn "1234567890".
>
> <http://bibliographica.org/entity/def456> a foaf:Person;
>    foaf:name "big bird";
>    bio:event [ a bio:Birth; bio:date "1970"^^xsd:gYear ].
>
> <http://bibliographica.org/entity/ghi789> a foaf:Agent;
>    foaf:name "big publisher".
>
> series and collections and such are handled with dc:isPartOf.
>
> There is also linkage between the "abstract entity", the
> book, author, publisher URIs above to the documents that contain
> their representation using foaf:primaryTopic.
>
> A "live" example is http://bnb.bibliographica.org/entry/GB8514494.n3
>
> Some care must be taken with creating records, and which graphs
> they live in, we store one graph for each book and one graph
> for each author, publisher and duplicate some data between them.
>
> The simplest way to create information is to just send the
> serialised RDF graph via HTTP POST to the appropriate URI. The
> way that this is done, and the automatic generation of URIs
> will be shortly revisited, but the basic mechanism will remain
> the same.
>
> All of this said, the "best" way to represent this kind of data
> in RDF is still very much an open question. The W3C incubator
> group for the topic will finish soon and is likely to spin off
> other working groups to try to hammer out some standards and
> best practices, but at the moment there is no real standard
> for this.
>
> So if Robert Myers is interested in modelling, and already has
> RDF data in Freebase, I would suggest just to think on the best
> representation that Freebase can have. Then we take the best
> attributes of that and improve our model, and write some
> inference rules to convert back and forth. This is worthwhile
> in the case of Freebase because there is a lot of data there
> that we may benefit from. After some more discussion and when
> this settles, this kind of functionality can be simply exposed
> as a button in the UI that says, "import from freebase" which
> will understand Freebase's conventions and run the inference
> rules to do the transformation. Because the inference rules
> are written down in a standard form, N3, we can publish those
> easily enough as well and would indeed include links to them
> in the provenance information for our record along with links
> to the source.
>
> For interest, not that Mr. Myers has to worry about this,
> such a block of provenance information would look like
> this:
>
> <http://bibliographica.org/entry/abc123> a opmv:Artifact;
>    opmv:wasGeneratedBy [
>        a opmv:Process;
>        opmv:used <http://bibliographica.org/rules/freebase.n3>,
>                  <http:/rdf.freebase.com/...>;
>        opmv:wasControlledBy <http://bibliographica.org/account/user...>;
>        ....
>    ].
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Cheers,
> -w
>
>
> * [2011-03-16 20:34:49 +0100] Primavera De Filippi <primavera.defilippi at okfn.org> écrit:
>
> ] Hi all,
> ] I have been talking with Robert Myers concerning possibility to integrate
> ] metadata from Freebase into PublicDomainWorks.net.
> ] Robert is grabbing information on visual artists and their works out of the
> ] freebase database, and we would like to make this information accessible to
> ] PublicDomainWorks.net.
> ] Right now, this can only be done by re-formatting freebase metadata into the
> ] format currently used by PublicDomainWorks.net.
> ]
> ] However, after a discussion with Rufus and Tatiana, we have agreed that the
> ] whole PDW database should be eliminated, and the interface should be
> ] re-coded so as to go and query directly the Bibliographica database. This
> ] operation will be done in the following months.
> ]
> ] Before we can do this, we need the technical specification of the format
> ] used by Bibliographica for their database, so that we can (1) import new
> ] data directly into Bibliographica, and (2) implement the code for
> ] PublicDomainWorks to directly query Bibliographica database.
> ]
> ] If anyone could provide a proper documentation on the format used for the
> ] metadata and the procedure to insert it into Bibliographica, that would be
> ] really helpful !
> ]
> ] Looking forward to your answer,
> ] Primavera
>
> ] _______________________________________________
> ] openbiblio-dev mailing list
> ] openbiblio-dev at lists.okfn.org
> ] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openbiblio-dev
>
>
> --
> William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
> http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
> F4B3 39BF E775 CF42 0BAB  3DF0 BE40 A6DF B06F FD45
>
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