Re: Disjointedness of FRBR classes

Tom, this utility of FRBR for bundling statements into sharable units  
is indeed a key part of its design. The sharable units are not,  
however, W|E|M|I, but W|WE|WEM|WEMI. I did a blog post on this:
   http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2010/05/frbr-and-sharability.html
You can see this in the cardinality constraint statements in FRBRer,  
where an E requires one and only one W, etc.

It seems to me that the Tillett/Murray paper (which I don't have a  
link to at the moment, sorry, maybe someone can provide - I'm on the  
road) doesn't address this aspect of FRBR.

More, perhaps, when I get better Internet access, but I've done about  
2-dozen blog posts on FRBR, so there may be more fodder there under  
that tag.

kc

Quoting Tom Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>:

> 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>
>
>



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

Received on Saturday, 29 October 2011 18:16:42 UTC