Re: Content-Carrier Proposal

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 11:00 PM, LAURA DAWSON <ljndawson@gmail.com> wrote:
> When we start streaming groceries, I will give up making sense of metadata entirely.

.. But that is when precise data will be crucial, as will the
disambiguation capabilities of producers be. As a consumer, you really
don't want the content to be conflated with the container in this
case. ;)

On a more serious note, I like this approach for identifying formats
(using the product ontology), since that's a wild and growing set of
types/materials.

As you've noted, this is our regular problem of describing the content
and the container as the same resource. While I consider Audiobook to
be a more specific type than Book (since if something is an audio
book, it is also a book), it seems the carrier type (Compact_Disk)
describes another entity (the container).

Perhaps at least a distinct property ("containerType"?) would be
usable. To hint that the thing described is viewed both as a content
(expression?) and a container (manifestation?) thereof (well a
prototypical one). This way, it is easier for a system to work out
facets (or even infer a common abstract entity if needed).

It would be good to consider more use cases for consumption. When
building (e.g. faceted) search and navigation, a distinction is more
workable. Consider questions like "what carrier types is this audio
book available in?". With just the type property to work with, one
would need to filter out the "CreativeWork" sub-types (or conversely
get only the sub-types of "Product"), which requires such systems to
have full type knowledge and infer this (either at index or query
time).

I'd still prefer to emphasize a distinction between work and instance
(or content and container, or expression and manifestation), since it
deals with the growing amount of data much better (and since a system
supporting it (linked graphs of entities) would also help catalogers
disambiguate and relieve them of duplicating titles, authors, subjects
etc.). But I figure that the focus here is to find some minimal
indication of this distinction via some properties on the same
(overloaded) resource to start with. That should be usable too.

.. I may have made my own mess of conflations here of course, e.g. by
equating container and manifestation. But I trust you to set me
straight. ;)

Cheers,
Niklas


> On Feb 3, 2013, at 4:37 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>
>> The question is: what about other industries? Music? Movie publishers? Software? Games? Groceries? I'm trying to think as broadly as possible.
>>
>> kc
>>
>> On 2/3/13 12:41 PM, Laura Dawson wrote:
>>> Outside the library world, we refer to it as "content" and "container" -
>>> so I don't think it's too far off.
>>>
>>> On 2/3/13 3:30 PM, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Richard,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for starting this. My first comment is that we need some good
>>>> definitions of "content" and "carrier." It's fairly common terminology
>>>> in the library world but not beyond.
>>>>
>>>> My second is that this links to a more general discussion I have been
>>>> thinking of starting on the general vocab list, which is about
>>>> "re-usable bits and facets." The content and carrier concepts are almost
>>>> universals and I can imagine "carrier" becoming a re-usable facet
>>>> available to any schemas that fine it useful. (Ditto things like
>>>> "location"). The library "content & carrier" could become a focus for
>>>> talking about how truly non-specific these concepts are and why the
>>>> creation of freely available facets could aid in metadata development.
>>>>
>>>> kc
>>>>
>>>> On 2/2/13 1:04 PM, Richard Wallis wrote:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I have just added a Content-Carrier proposal to the Wiki.
>>>>>
>>>>> It does not propose extension of the vocabulary as such, but I have
>>>>> linked it from the Vocabulary Proposals page
>>>>> <http://www.w3.org/community/schemabibex/wiki/Vocabulary_Proposals> as
>>>>> it is a proposal as to a recommended way to apply the current vocabulary
>>>>> to address an issue that concerns this group.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ~Richard.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Karen Coyle
>>>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>>>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>>>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>>>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
>

Received on Sunday, 3 February 2013 23:58:02 UTC