- From: Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>
- Date: Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:16:01 -0400
- To: Ross Singer <ross.singer@talis.com>
- Cc: Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net>, public-lld@w3.org
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 09:30:28PM +0100, Ross Singer wrote: > > Would it help simply to stop saying that the WEMI classes are disjoint? > > What's the benefit in this? What have I said if I say that this thing > is a Work and an Expression (since neither of these exist in nature)? If Work and Expression were considered "points of view", at different levels of abstraction, for describing a resource, then the utility of FRBR could lie in the way FRBR prescribes conventions for bundling particular sets of statements about a resource into separate graphs. If the bundle of statements conventionally made for Works, and the bundle of statements conventionally made for Expressions, were followed with reasonable consistency, they could help distribute the maintenance of the set of information held in legacy catalog records to multiple agencies. This is a _practical_ benefit. Turning the question around: If Works and Expressions do not exist in nature, what is the benefit in saying that a resource _cannot_ be both? And what is the cost? > If anything, removing the restrictions seems to dilute the point of > bothering with FRBR at all. Removing formal-semantic "restrictions" does not necessarily mean removing semantic "conventions", which may have real practical utility (see above). Tom -- Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>
Received on Wednesday, 26 October 2011 23:16:36 UTC