Re: Works and instances

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

> I'm not questioning whether people have
> a notion of "work". I'm saying that I don't think that there will be much
> metadata for Work alone, at least not yet.

I think that depends a lot on the source of your metadata.  If you
start with a dusty book on a shelf somewhere, there may be a limited
amount of Work metadata available (although you could certainly work
out some basics like creator/author), but things like Wikipedia
articles about a book or a GoodReads/LibraryThing page about a book
are going to be almost entirely about the Work.  They'll discuss
things like when it was written, first published, what languages it's
been translated into, what language it was written in originally, etc.
-- all, to my mind, properties of a Work.

I agree with Richard that most users are going to mostly be searching
for Works, with a final filter of a particular delivery medium ie the
Netflix/DVD/Blu-ray version of the movie or the free e-book version of
the book.  Most of the time they don't care about the stuff in the
middle like which translation of the work it is or whether it's the
director's cut of the movie (although a few will).

> So your example
> of two books and a movie fits in nicely here. If you want to say that they
> are the same work, you could create a Work "record" with an identifier using
> schema:creativeWork.

I can't imagine anyone saying that a book and a movie are the same
work.  One could debate at what level of granularity you want to model
the adaptation from book to the Broadway play to the screenplay to the
movie to the remake of the movie to the movie version of the book, but
I don't think there'd be much debate that a movie and a book are
different works.

> Or you could "daisy chain" them together by saying that
> they represent the same content. This is essentially what OCLC appears to do
> in WorldCat -- gathering the records that represent the same work, but not
> creating a new description for the work. (I actually think this is how FRBR
> *should* deal with works, but since it's based on cataloging rather than
> user activity, it takes a different approach.) This allows people to create
> work groupings based on their own needs, rather than a top-down approach
> where they have to discover a work description to use in order to connect
> their bibliographic descriptions.

This is getting into the mechanics of how the data collection is done
which I think is different from how the data is modeled.  Whether a
cataloger selects a work to link to or this information comes from the
publisher or an AI program works it out after OCRing title page is an
"implementation detail."

Tom

Received on Monday, 7 January 2013 16:35:36 UTC