Re: Review of 'Use Cases and Requirements for Ontology and API for Media Object 1.0', Working Draft 19 January 2009

Hello!
> Felix Sasaki wrote :
>   
>> b) with several abtraction layers we face the challenge of loosing
>> simplicity for people who want to implement simple applications (...)
>>     
>
> It seems to me that a mean of hiding this complexity for people not
> interested in it would be that every *specific* object (e.g. frbr:Item
> or bbc:Broadcast) inherits, in the API, the properties of the more
> abstracts elements (resp. frbr:Manifestation, bbc:Episode).
>
> So I can ask for the ISBN of an book Item (though this is strictly
> speaking a property of the Manifestation), or to which Series a
> Broadcast belongs (though this is actually the Episode that belongs to a
> Series).
>
> Yves, does that make sense? Do the implementation you are aware of
> provide this kind of inheriance/proxy mechanism?
>   

Hmm. I never saw that done anywhere. I think one of the reason may be 
that the relationships between different abstraction layers can be 
something else than a strict hierarchy. For example, a Manifestation (a 
recording) can come from several Expressions (several performances), 
etc. So such an inheritance rule is actually quite hard to define.

Also, it tends to be quite unclean. Properties of a performance (date, 
place, performers, instruments, etc.) are not properties of an mp3 file.

I think it is highly desirable to have a schema as normalised as 
possible in your backend, and maybe collapse it in the UI side if it 
does bring benefit to the end-user.

Best,
y
>
> This would imply that users concerned about the different levels could
> disable this mechanism in order to only get the strict properties of the
> level they are interested in. But it seems to me that it fulfills the
> usual requirement:
>
>  make simple things simple, and complex things possible
>
>   pa
>
>
>   


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Received on Friday, 6 February 2009 14:13:50 UTC