RE: Archive as a collection of things

> 1) yes, "owns" does half of the job, rather, part of it. Let me add something
> more, just to share knowledge and clarify the archival perspective. Archives are
> supposed to be repositories of authentic records. In order to guarantee and
> maintain authenticity we need to know what happens to objects from creation
> time till they come into our hands--any information gap may result in an
> "authenticity gap", since we may not be able to guarantee that records have
> not been tampered with, corrupted, misplaced etc. "What happens to objects"
> means that we need to know of any change of either the real obejcts (i.e.,
> change of format, amendments, compression...) or their context, that is, their
> surroundings, including owners, custodians or any other agent who had a role
> in maintaining the environment in which records are preserved.

It seems like http://schema.org/Event and/or http://schema.org/Action could help track the history of an item. The connection back to the ArchivalItem items could presumably be made using http://schema.org/object.


> 2) I'm not sure "hold" can be defined as a temporary ownership. For what I
> know the difference is legal. Objects may be held for decades by agent X, yet
> the property right may be held by agent Y. "To Hold" is about keeping stuff, "To
> Own" is about having a title of property on it.

This seems somewhat analogous to https://schema.org/TradeAction cases where temporal/transient control can be expressed and attached to a thing, again via http://schema.org/object. 

Jeff

> 3) Hence, the idea of enhancing OwnershipInfo doesn't seem to work to me,
> because it is anyway a value of property "own", which is a different thing from
> "hold/keep/whatever".
> 
> In short, I would go for a different property. I understand your concerns, so
> maybe "Keep" may work. Otherwise, if we agree anyway that a class is needed,
> let's call it "Foo1" for the moment---we'll find the label later.
> 
> 
> re CreativeWorks:
> I agree with you, except that while it is true that "archivists identify that they
> have a need to describe a category [...] named Documents", it is not corrrect to
> state that archivists identify such a category as a CreativeWork--we are just
> discussing about it and see what the best solution is.
> 
> Giovanni
> 
> 
> 
> On 2015-08-07 3:20 PM, Richard Wallis wrote:
> > More good points and analysis - comments below...
> >
> > ~Richard
> >
> >     1) with regard to the two potential approaches there is a major
> >     issue: "owns" (ie "Products owned by the organization or person"
> >     [sic]) is not an adequate property for describing custody. When we
> >     talk about custodial history we are not necessarily talking about
> >     owning. Archives may be deposited, or borrowed (e.g., for an
> >     exhibition), so at a given time they may be possessed by an archival
> >     institution, while being owned (i.e. possessed by right) by some
> >     other subject. The custodial history is the story of the custody,
> >     not the story of the owners. We need to trace it, because it
> >     provides fundamental information to assess authenticity.
> >
> >
> > Sounds like "owns" [with suitable expansion to include Things that are
> > not only Products] only does half the job, and we need a parallel
> > mechanism to describing temporary ownership or 'holding'.  One
> > possibility could be to enhance OwnershipInfo
> > <http://schema.org/OwnershipInfo> to be capable of describing
> > ownership of a temporary nature. Alternatively we could go for another
> > property to alongside owns. The name of 'holds' immediately comes to
> > mind but I fear it would not be acceptable to the the wider Schema.org
> > group due to alternative meanings in areas such as sport and medicine.
> >
> >
> >     2) with regard to archives as CreativeWorks, I agree with you: it
> >     cannot be argued that "a government document is not a type of
> >     CreativeWork", not because it is indeed, but because as a matter of
> >     fact CreativeWorks are not defined. It is strange though that we can
> >     find email messages, datasets, books, and any sort of things in the
> >     CreativeWorks bucket, while documents and records have not been
> >     mentioned at all. I think first of all we should define a class for
> >     Document, since the bulk of an archives is made by documents after all.
> >
> >
> > With the evolving nature of Schema.org it is not that surprising that
> > apparently obvious things are not yet represented in the vocabulary.
> > Types get into the vocabulary when a need is identified.  This is
> > exactly the process that we are engaged in here -- archivists identify
> > that they have a need to describe a category of CreativeWorks named
> > Documents and propose the creation of such a Type in an archives
> > extension or even potentially in the core vocabulary.
> >
> > I have updated the Wiki Page
> > <https://www.w3.org/community/architypes/wiki/Main_Page> to reflect
> > this suggestion.
> >
> >
> >     Giovanni
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >     On 2015-08-07 1:04 AM, Richard Wallis wrote:
> >
> >         Some good points Sarah - comments below...
> >
> >              Two properties stick out to me that are not covered as far
> >         as I can
> >              tell in the generic Collection schema:
> >
> >              1. Holding archives/institution: because archives are
> >         unique, it's
> >              important to record the institution that holds the collection.
> >
> >
> >              Related to this point:
> >
> >              2. Custodial history, or the archival history of the collection
> >              before and during its custody in an institution. This is
> >         important
> >              to record for making presumptions of authenticity and
> >         understanding
> >              the limits to what the collection contains (e.g., half of
> >         it was
> >              lost in a fire, etc)
> >
> >
> >         There are a couple of potential approaches to these points.  Firstly
> >         coming at it from the holding organization's point of view:
> >
> >            * Organization <http://schema.org/Organization> has an owns
> >              <http://schema.org/owns> property that has OwnershipInfo
> >              <http://schema.org/OwnershipInfo>  as one of the options in its
> >              range. OwnershipInfo <http://schema.org/OwnershipInfo> has some
> >              useful properties for capturing some of the things you describe
> >              associated with ArchivesCollections it may hold.
> >            * Some of the current descriptions of these properties are very
> >              Product focused, but recommending that an Organization can
> >              additionally own CreativeWorks (such as an
> >         ArchivesCollection) could
> >              well work.
> >
> >         Secondly from the point of view of describing the same current and
> >         historical information for a collection:
> >
> >            * The OwnershipInfo Type could be enhanced to include the owner
> >              Organization
> >            * The proposed ArchivesCollection could have an ownedBy
> >         property which
> >              would have Organization, Person, and OwnershipInfo in its
> > range
> >
> >
> >              Giovanni touched on this in the other thread covering items in
> >              collections.
> >
> >              Re: CreativeWork: in addition to the examples that you raise
> >              Richard, there is a lot of content in archival collections
> >         which
> >              many would argue isn't "creative" in nature, such as data,
> >              governmental documents, etc. I would be glad to see us
> >         expand the
> >              hasPart idea beyond the scope of CreativeWork.
> >
> >
> >         So will I.  Not sure that in the generic Schema.org world that
> >         you could
> >         argue that a government document is not a type of CreativeWork, but
> >         there are many other non-CreativeWork items that can be found in
> >         Archives.
> >
> >
> >
>

Received on Friday, 7 August 2015 16:05:46 UTC