Re: Disjointedness of FRBR classes

Jeff Young wrote:

> frbr:Work 
> rdfs:subClassOf schema:CreativeWork, dcterms:BibliographicResoure .
> frbr:Expression 
> rdfs:subClassOf schema:CreativeWork, dcterms:BibliographicResoure .
> frbr:Manifestation 
> rdfs:subClassOf schema:CreativeWork, dcterms:BibliographicResoure .
> frbr:Item 
> rdfs:subClassOf schema:CreativeWork, dcterms:BibliographicResoure .

How about 

schema:CreativeWork owl:equivalentClass
  frbr:Endeavour, dcterms:BibliographicResource .

Is there any relevant difference between the three? You could argue that
not
every creative work is bibliographic, but it becomes bibliographic as
soon as
you describe it. A document is whatever functions as a document (see
Buckland's classical paper "What is a 'document'?" from 1997:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html). Furthermore:

frbr:Endeavour owl:equivalentClass
  schema:CreativeWork,
  dcterms:BibliographicResource,
  bibo:Document,
  foaf:Document .

>> Is a flip-book a book
>> or a movie? (It *is* an example of moving pictures.
>
> I would argue that it is both a schema:Book AND a schema:Movie. This 
> gets back to my complaint about forcing things into a single type.

I fully agree. Likewise a library can be both a collection, a place, and
an
organisation.

>> My guess is that schema.org can afford to ignore the edge cases in 
>> a way that libraries cannot. schema.org is not endeavoring to catalog

>> and preserve materials.

If libraries would start ignoring edge cases, they would have at least 
solutions for the most common cases. Instead they first try to solve
all cases and end up not having solved any. It would not harm to start
with a simplified schema such as two or three non-disjoint classes

frbr:Work
frbr:Edition (possibly, in doubt just skip it)
frbr:Item

and get to the difficult cases (frbr:Manifestation, frbr:Expression,
etc.)
later. The basic distinction between an abstract creative work,
document,
bibliographic entity .. at one side and a concrete single exemplar,
holding,
copy ... at the other side, is already more than schema.org, bibo, foaf
...
offer. FRBR could really help in this common case. Instead it tries to 
solve every edge case by splitting the universe into four disjoint
classes.

Jakob



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Received on Tuesday, 1 November 2011 20:36:59 UTC