Works and instances

I have been attempting for a while to respond to the definition of 
properties relating works and instances. The problem may be that I have 
been reading (too much?) about the work concept lately, and so I try to 
cover too much ground.

(Aside: recommended reading on the library concept of Work: Martha Yee's 
four part series "What is a work?" [1] It is a relatively easy read, 
there are examples, and the first part gives excellent historic background.)

I will try to simplify with only a few comments:

1) "instanceOf" between two schema:creativeWork descriptions would only 
be meaningful under certain conditions (e.g. one describes a work in the 
abstract only), conditions which I consider to be (at this point in 
time) unlikely to occur. Point 2 is one of the reasons for this opinion.

2) There is no accepted definition of "workness" even within the LAM 
environment. cf. FRBRoo,[2] ISTC,[3] FaBIO, [4], not to mention BIBFRAME 
[5], all of which differ from each other and from the description on 
this group's wiki. (cf the example on the wiki, of 2 books and a movie, 
is not aligned with FRBR:Work, but would make sense to many people).

3) It isn't clear to me whether works will be things (with identifiers), 
post-description clusters (with or without IDs. a la' VIAF), or 
relationships between bibliographic descriptions (e.g. "sameWork" 
between two schema:Book descriptions)

4) The term "instance" for a mass-produced product is not helpful. It 
could be applied to "singularities" like works of art, but not for 
products. schema:creativeWork may describe both products and 
singularities, without distinguishing which it is. Most schema:Book 
descriptions will be manufactured products, but note that there is no 
schema:manuscript. (schema:Painting and schema:Sculpture, which should 
describe singularities, appear to be place-holders since they do not 
extend schema:creativeWork.)

Beyond this, it gets even more complex, and I do not believe that we can 
resolve this at this time. My recommendation is that it is premature to 
introduce this concept into schema.org. There are other relationships, 
in particular the part/whole relationship that Richard also has included 
on the wiki, that are more useful. We should concentrate on those.

kc


[1] Linked from http://myee.bol.ucla.edu/workspub.htm
[2] http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbr_inro.html
[3] http://www.istc-international.org/html/
[4] http://www.essepuntato.it/lode/http:/purl.org/spar/fabio
[5] http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/bibframe-112312.html
-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Sunday, 6 January 2013 20:09:05 UTC