Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

Karen and others:
 
OK, I found the earlier post I made about this; it was to Karen, Dan B and Tom
B, off-list:
 
*Begins*
Dan and others:
 
I raised much of this with the FRBR Review Group at IFLA 2010; we had an
extensive discussion ;-)
 
The RG confirmed that the FRBRer class Person covers fictitious entities:
"Includes literary figures, legendary figures, divinities, and named animals as
literary figures, actors, and performers." The quote is from the FRAD text. The
FRAD text, which has other "Includes ..." notes will be added as an extra scope
note to the FRBRer class Person in the FRAD ontology currently in development
(the FRBRer, FRAD and FRSAD models will be published as separate ontologies,
with FRSAD using elements of FRAD/FRBRer, and FRAD using elements of FRBRer; a
consolidated FR ontology will take at least another year to develop).
 
Note that this "clarification" to the FRBRer class results in a clash with the
class in FRBRoo: tied-in with CIDOC CRM, it excludes fictitious persons. The RG
agreed that the FRBRoo class needs review and amendment.
 
This is the scope note for the original frbrer:Person class:  
"The entity defined as person encompasses individuals that are deceased as well
as those that are living. For the purposes of this model persons are treated as
entities only to the extent that they are involved in the creation or
realization of a work (e.g., as authors, composers, artists, editors,
translators, directors, performers, etc.), or are the subject of a work (e.g.,
as the subject of a biographical or autobiographical work, of a history, etc.)."
 
And the full additional scope note from FRAD:
 
"Includes real individuals. Includes personas or identities established or
adopted by an individual through the use of more than one name (e.g., the
individual's real name and/or one or more pseudonyms). Includes personas or
identities established or adopted jointly by two or more individuals (e.g.,
Ellery Queen — joint pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee). Includes
literary figures, legendary figures, divinities, and named animals as literary
figures, actors, and performers. Includes personas or identities established or
adopted by a group (e.g., Betty Crocker). Includes appellations established by
research (e.g., Bedford Meister, Meister E.S.). May include clusters of
individuals who bear the same name, whenever it is not possible to establish a
differentiated identity for each individual within the cluster."
 
The definition of frbrer:Person is "An individual".
 
The FRSAD model is unlikely to result in any changes to definition or scope. But
I've just noticed that the original FRBR scope note doesn't cover individuals
associated with manifestations or items, although relationships such as owned-by
and produced-by are defined elsewhere, and have been represented as RDF
properties with frbrer:Person as range, etc., so I guess the FR consolidated
model will need to add another scope note ...
 
Note the reference to animals. The RG concluded that "Lassie" was an instance of
Person, and that the paw print in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre constituted
an instance of a Work (and Expression, etc.) created by Lassie. Unless the
definition of foaf:Person can be stretched to include animals, it will be
difficult to justify equivalence or sub-relationships between frbrer:Person and
foaf:Person - I guess foaf:Agent would be the bridge, as a super-class of both.
 
Note the reference to personas adopted by a group: again, this suggests that
frbrer:Person is a sub-class of foaf:Agent. But I wonder if frbrer:Person is a
super-class of foaf:Group, foaf:Person, and foaf:Organization?
 
The other issue is context. The original FRBR scope note clearly restricts the
context to individuals of bibliographic interest; but that includes authors and
subjects, and does not suggest that they should be treated differently.
 
(Digression: the dilemma of author vs subject (acute with autobiographies!) has
been around in Libraryland for many years. It is a systems artefact: authors and
subjects usually have separate authority files, so if I want to avoid duplicate
authority record maintenance I have to assign a heading to one or the other, but
not both. I guess this is less of an issue in Linkeddataland; if so, another
advantage of the linked-data approach ...)
 
So there is no person-as-person vs person-as-topic problem in the FRBR RDF.
 
I'm becoming aware of the importance of foaf:focus in this; there's an overlap
with the discussions on an application profile for FRSAD, etc. I'll need to read
a bit more, too!
 
Not mentioned so far: what about roles? They describe a context: the frbrer
property is-created-by-(person) is a role that puts a person in the context of a
work, and so on. Can we use a collection or family of roles to model the
bibliographic context of frbrer:Person, etc. to make a linked-but-distinct
relationship with FOAF?
 
If so, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework already has a comprehensive set of
bibliographic roles (from Libraryland and the publishing community) grouped into
families. Can these be used as class restrictions in OWL to glue FR and FOAF?
 
Note, the FRBR RG has discussed links to FOAF. The RG is keen on the idea, and
will try to learn from FOAF when discussing the FR consolidated model,
especially with respect to the subject and name/identifier issues which are
already recognized as the most important. So all of this thread is great for
FRBR as well as LLD.
*Ends*
 
Perhaps one of the original recipients could post the preceding parts of the
thread, if you think it would help explain my reply ...
 
And perhaps some discussion about the questions I raised?
 
Cheers
 
Gordon
 
 

On 31 October 2010 at 14:49 Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Thinking more about our attempt to reconcile frad:Person and 
> foaf:Person, I realize that I don't know how frad defines Person class 
> in its model (and I don't have access to the documentation other than 
> the registered properties in the metadata registry). From what I can 
> glean from the frad terms in the metadata registry, the frad classes 
> and subclasses are:
>
> Bibliographic Entity
>   - Person
>   - Family
>   - Corporate body
> Name
> Rules
> Agency
> Identifier
> Controlled Access Point
>
> I don't see an obvious connection between, for example, the Person and 
> the Name or the Identifier. Does someone have a diagram they can 
> contribute? (Gordon, you may have sent me one at some time, but I seem 
> to have lost it. Sorry.)
>
> I'm trying to get my head around what the "join" would be between frad 
> and foaf; what would allow linking and what the link(s) would infer. 
> And I must admit that from the above, the fact that Person is a 
> subclass of Bibliographic Entity makes it somewhat puzzling to me.
>
> Thanks,
> kc
>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
>