Re: Works and instances

Just a few comments to throw into the mix.  I think that we have to 
remember that even though a machine will be making use of the metadata, 
a wide variety of humans (most likely) with varying skills will be 
assigning it.    Whatever the schema is, it will have to be simple and 
clear enough to use or the end result will not be helpful.  We'll also 
be interested in not only linking related things, but NOT linking things 
which look related but aren't (in an automated way).  The ability to do 
both will be crucial.

Phil

On 1/7/2013 8:39 AM, Laura Dawson wrote:
> When I was at Muze (now Rovi), which aggregates data about books, music,
> movies, and video games, we used the example of "The Godfather", which is
> a book, a soundtrack, several movies, and a video game. We wanted to
> define the concept/story of "The Godfather" uniquely, and branch out by
> type of product from that.
>
> This became massively problematic very quickly (significant differences
> between book and movie(s), video game does not really adhere to the plot),
> and we never did get One Database To Rule Them All. We certainly spent a
> lot of time circling the drain, though.
>
> On 1/7/13 11:35 AM, "Tom Morris"<tfmorris@gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
>


-- 
Philip E. Schreur
Head, Metadata Department
Stanford University
650-723-2454
650-725-1120 (fax)

Received on Monday, 7 January 2013 17:17:59 UTC