RE: Non- and Partial-FRBR Metadata

Karen,

This might be a bit radical, but what would happen to your model if,
rather than thinking of the FRBR entities as 'entities', you thought of
them as simply classifications/groupings of the properties describing a
single bibliographic resource -- an item? What would it look like if you
simply described an item with all of the properties available to you in
your data, and then organized those properties into FRBRish categories,
without worrying about inheritance or entity relationships or class
definition or anything else? Could you then declare those
categorizations to be classes of 'things' that bear some definable
relationship to each other and to the more formal FRBR entities? 

Just curious.

Jon

-----Original Message-----
From: public-lld-request@w3.org [mailto:public-lld-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2010 12:54 PM
To: public-lld
Subject: Non- and Partial-FRBR Metadata

I have a dilemma which I think is fairly common. I have bibliographic
data that does not follow the FRBR group 1 divisions (work, expression,
manifestation, item). These are entries in the Open Library database,
which has two levels rather than four: Work, and Everything Else.
(OCLC's WorldCat appears to have the same division.) I want to create a
relationship between the Work and the Everything Else entity (using
their respective identifiers).

As defined, FRBR only allows relationships from Expression to Work, and
Manifestation to Expression. (I will gloss over Item because there is
little item-level information in the records I am concerned with.) What
I need, however, is a relationship between a Manifestation (with some
Expression information) and a Work. The same Expression information may
be found in more than one bibliographic entry so there is no true
Expression entity that is defined in the data.

I have often seen pre-FRBR bibliographic data coded as "Manifestation"  
when in fact the data has elements that FRBR would associate with Work,
Expression and Manifestation. This brings up more than one question
(mainly: what does calling a bibliographic entity a Manifestation mean
if there is no "Manifests" relationship? -- In other words, are the FRBR
group 1 entities things, relationships, or both?), but on a practical
level it seems that we will need to work with bibliographic data that
either is not modeled as FRBR entities, or that models a variation on
these entities. I'm thinking that some new classes and some new
relationships may be needed to accommodate this.

Does anyone have ideas about the best way to go about this?

kc
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 19:28:53 UTC