Re: Open Library and RDF

Tom and others
 
I hope to be in on Thursday's call, and would be delighted to report back from
IFLA. I've only just exited the IFLA hothouse; there was a special meeting of
the FRBR Review Group today to consider the RDF representations of FRBRer and
FRAD (I'm still working on FRSAD). I travel back tomorrow, and will need some
time on Wednesday to recover from what has been 14 days without a break.
 
I can say right now that we have agreed to create unbounded versions of FRBRer
and FRAD properties in a separate namespace from those already in draft in the
Open Metadata Registry; we'll link the controlled models with the unbounded ones
using sub-property and sub-class relationships as appropriate. Only the
controlled models will be recommended by the Review Group, for reasons already
raised, but we hope the unbounded stuff will be of some use to other
communities. But we also intend, eventually, to related the controlled models to
much broader properties and classes such as FOAF, SKOS, etc. We are going to
need expert advice on this (e.g. is frbrer:something subproperty/class
frbrerlite:something subproperty/class skos/foaf/etc:something sensible?), and
hope the LLD XG will be able to help. Please, please do not respond to this
specific issue right now, and give me time to produce something more structured
for consideration. I'm hoping to submit a bunch of use cases over the next week
or two.
 
I'm feeling very positive about the outcomes of IFLA discussions this past week;
there have been a lot of good developments and decisions, some of which
Emmanuelle and others may already have mentioned - I still need to read later
emails. I've been unable to contribute as much as I want to the LLD XG so far
because IFLA protocol operates on a one-year cycle, effectively; they now know
that much faster responses are needed, and are happy for this to happen when
appropriate.
 
More later, especially Thursday.
 
Cheers
 
Gordon
 

On 16 August 2010 at 00:47 Thomas Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 10:21:51PM +0100, gordon@gordondunsire.com wrote:
> >                                             Despite powerful economic
> >drivers,
> > weaker models have generally not been successful in academic and national
> > library environments (or in larger public reference libraries).
>
> But have stronger models really had an opportunity to
> prove their success in the new environment of the Web age?
> And are AACR or MARC considered "models" in the sense of FRBR
> and RDA?  As I see it, the advent of the (Semantic) Web marks
> the first time in the history of knowledge representation
> that knowledge producers are faced with the challenge (and
> opportunity) of knitting together independently produced
> knowledge representations on the basis of machine-processable
> languages on a global scale.  This is much different than the
> situation of a closed (albeit large) silo of library records
> based on institutionally mandated data formats.
>
> > If non-library communities wish to take advantage of the vast experience of
> > professional librarians represented in the FR and RDA models, then AAA,
> > surely?
>
> What is AAA... [1]?
>
> [1] http://www.all-acronyms.com/AAA
>
> > Of course, if library communities were (generally) resourced by commercial
> > organisations, non-heritage government agencies and the like, then I'm sure
> > they
> > would be as responsive to the needs of such communities as they are to their
> > actual users.
>
> It is true that libraries have been and may well remain the
> primary users of library standards, but if the point is to
> produce data that also plays well outside the library's walls,
> this must be considered in its design.
>
> > As it is, both the FR and RDA committees are actively considering developing
> > unbounded super-class/property versions of their models, resources
> > permitting.
> > Expect some announcements soon.
>
> That sounds promising!  Actually, I have no quarrel with
> highly constrained models for use by trained professionals
> in libraries.  Within the library walls, production of data
> can be tightly defined and usage guidelines enforced by
> detailed application profiles.  But this can perhaps be done
> while exposing data that is not so strongly specified as to
> continually raise fatal ontological exceptions when linked
> into mash-ups.
>
> Will you be on Thursday's call?  I'd like to put a slot on the
> agenda for a report from you and others (Marcia, Emmanuelle,
> Bernard...?) about the IFLA conference.  It would be great if
> you, Karen, and Marcia could briefly report on the status of
> the FR and RDA efforts.  I'd be interested to hear your views
> on whether the LLD XG could or should try to reach out to
> those communities or, for example, suggest follow-on actions
> for a wider review of these vocabularies from a Semantic
> Web perspective.
>
> Tom

Received on Monday, 16 August 2010 19:46:04 UTC