Re: a Simplified Ontology for Bibliographic Resources (SOBR)

Ross Singer asked:

> What's the advantage of describing records?

Damn, you are the second one asking this question ;-) Just ignore the
record class. I think about minting URIs for records in our library
catalogs - records can be used to add some provenance to document
descriptions, but maybe there are better solutions. It's no requirement
to describe records, so just forget about it.

The core of SOBR / https://gist.github.com/1331983 is based on the
following assumptions:

1. There are documents. (sobr:Document)

People don't agree on what is a document (something physical? something
abstract? something written? something documented? ...). Some library
scientists say that anything can be a document. See Michael Buckland's
paper "What is a document?":
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html

So we need an RDF class for documents. We already have bibo:Document,
schema:CreativeWork, foaf:Document, and frbr:Endevaour, which are all
equivalent in my opinion. I only created the new class sobr:Document
because there are other opinions and I don't want to argue about whether
documents in BIBO, Schema.org, FOAF, and/or FRBR are different. Anything
can be a sobr:Document without limitations and preconditions.

2. Some documents are single items. (sobr:Item)

Some documents are single physical or digital copies, holdings, or
items. This class is well represented by frbr:Item if you strip all
dependencies and requirements connected to Items in the FRBR model.

3. Items can be copies of other documents. (sobr:exemplar)

This is a relationship between documents that are items and other
(unrestricted) documents. You often call the other documents "editions"
or "works" but there is no need to do so. I prefer the term "exemplar"
to name this property. We could say that all copies/exemplars are equal
in some sense, so this relationship defines synonym sets for items which
are copies of the same document and every item is an exemplar of itself
(there could be a symmetric sub-property exemplarOfSameWork which only
connects items).

4. Some documents are editions of other documents (sobr:edition)

You don't have to use the concept of editions, but some people like to
select some documents and name them editions. To collect all these
documents, there is the class sobr:Edition. Editions are always
edition-of some other document. This other document may be an abstract
work or a concrete object, there are no restrictions. The point is, that
someone took a document and edited it to create a new document (this can
also be a physical, conrete, or abstract document).


As already said, we need no new concept of documents, but to represent
library catalogs, we (or at least the libraries I work for) need this
two concepts of editions and items/copies/holdings. 

Jakob


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Received on Friday, 4 November 2011 18:59:55 UTC