Re: BIBFRAME and schema.org

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
>
> It's pointless to add FRBR/Holdings to Schema.org because they already have the critical components built-in to their schema:Product/schema:Offer branch. It's presumably fair to say that most SchemaBibEx members don’t want to look at it that way, but there it is.

Jeff:

At this point, I would avoid saying anything about what most
SchemaBibEx members want or don't want! Touchy subject area :)

I volunteered to experiment with modelling library holdings because
I'm interested in improving Evergreen's schema.org integration - and
your suggestion of using Product/Offer seems workable, so I'm going to
give that a shot.

Some of my (still half-formed) thoughts on FRBR in schema.org:

During the last call, I proposed (via chat) that Freebase's
adaptedWork / adaptedFrom properties might make more sense than the
proposed hasInstance / isInstanceOf for expressing relationships
between CreativeWorks. I'm not sure we really need a Platonic ideal /
FRBR Work in schema.org; it seems to be a potential rat hole that
would be better avoided, as the abstract "Work" is subject to
revisionism and argumentation for little benefit to the linked data
effort.

For example: would the abstract CreativeWork for "The Little Mermaid"
be the Disney creation? Surely not; it would be the Hans Christian
Andersen work on which the Disney story was based, but it would not be
the English translation; it would be "Den lille havfrue" - but wait,
Andersen's work doesn't even include "Ariel" as a character's name,
and surely the vast majority of people looking for "The Little
Mermaid" actually want the Disney films / books / tv series / video
games / figurines / stickers / whatever... and perhaps at some point
in the future we will discover that Andersen's work was based on a
previously existing oral tale. Do we even want to try to have to
express that, and maintain that, when it seems much better suited to
the realm of historical literature academics & their research papers &
books & conference proceedings?

In short, I don't think an abstract CreativeWork and all of the FRBR
Work baggage that would carry offers significant benefits to our
efforts. I, for one, would be happy to link off to, say, the wikipedia
page on "The Little Mermaid" (either
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(1989_film) or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(franchise) or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(disambiguation)) or
their Freebase equivalents, and let the linked data lead interested
parties to explore the connections and arguments further.

Dan

P.S. I apologize for the half-formedness of these thoughts; I'm
starting a sabbatical next week, and rather amusingly back in August
2012 part of my sabbatical proposal was to work on expressing library
system metadata in schema.org and structured data vocabularies in
general... so the timing of this group forming was in some ways
horrible (as I have been unable to commit the time that it deserved),
but now I can start to put my back into it in a serious way and hope
to be able to contribute both more concretely (by way of continuing
implementations of the group's proposals in Evergreen with real
library data) as well as more deeply (by being able to focus on the
subject matter at more length).

Received on Friday, 28 June 2013 15:52:42 UTC