Re: Disjointedness of FRBR classes

Hi Jakob,

On 31 Oct 2011, at 23:37, "Jakob Voss" <Jakob.Voss@gbv.de> wrote:

> Hi Ian,
> 
>> I'm not party to the full discussion but in our bib data modelling
>> at Talis we moved on from FRBR towards describing the real 
>> objects, not an abstract model of them.
> 
> If you discuss about FRBR long enough, works, manifestations,
> expressions
> and items become pretty real ;-)
> 
>> Rob Styles at Talis blogged about it a couple of years ago but his
>> blog is temporarily offline. Here's a substantial quote from it
> though:
>> http://www.frbr.org/2009/11/13/styles-bringing-frbr-down-to-earth
> 
> Does this reflect current work at Talis on modeling/describing
> bibliographic
> resources?
> 
> http://consulting.talis.com/2011/07/british-library-data-model-overview/
> 
> I don't expect Talis and British Library to implement full FRBR, but I 
> wonder about the lack of any concept of holdings, items, copies etc. 
> compared to at least editions. Do the central URIs in the BL model 
> represent physical books? What about books with two or more 
> copies in the BL - two unrelated URIs? Are there no relations 
> between multiple editions of the same book? 

The BL started by looking at the British National Bibliography because it was to them a well know dataset.  The data is about heaps of things that matched whatever their inclusion criteria is at the time of publication.  As a dataset it does not relate to actual holdings/copies/items specifically, although of course they may have copies of titles talked about by the data in the BNB.

The BL started with a subset of the BNB - monographs - and took time to think about how the data they had available described the thing being published. The overview you link to describes this process of thinking in more detail.

The crucial part of the thinking behind the data model as it stands today is that it should be: easily  understood by someone who is not a cataloguer; easy to extend as new information becomes available; easy to link to other related things.

So if some organisation interested in the works of Jane Austen decides to produce a description of all her works as linked data, then there is a good chance there will be a uri for a single work.  That uri would almost certainly not be described using any recognisably frbrish vocabulary.

If the BL uses a vocabulary that imposes restrictions on how the term is used those restrictions might mean that linking to outside sources becomes more difficult, as the scheme definition starts to imply things about the data that are not meant.

Much better is to start simply with the easy things to describe, but model the domain in a way that is extensible.  Even now the BL are thinking about how they can extend the model to cover multipart works, and are finding that the way it has been modelled so far is likely to make this simpler.

So yes, the BNB data does represent physical books. But not strictly at the inventory level. Currently there are no relations between editions, but this is because the Marc record data does not have the granularity to support this.

> 
> Jakob
> 
> --
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> jakob.voss@gbv.de
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG)
> Digitale Bibliothek - Jakob Voß
> Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1
> 37073 Goettingen - Germany
> +49 (0)551 39-10242
> http://www.gbv.de
> jakob.voss@gbv.de
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 November 2011 07:33:35 UTC