Re: Works and instances

>From an earlier, off-list e-mail from me to Karen...

We can't afford to be prescriptive about WEMI. But I think we can draw some 'good enough' distinctions between:

 *   this particular copy (such as the one I have on my shelf)
 *   this particular product (such as the one I can order from the online store)
 *   this particular 'title' (such as the one I am reviewing on my blog)

The details of whether The girl with the dragon tattoo and Män som hatar kvinnor are the same 'title' is probably something that the person on the street is much clearer on (Answer: 'No') than a librarian (Answer: 'Hmm, maybe. By "title" do you mean FRBR work or FRBR expression?'). Of course it could be the other way around if you ask whether the second edition is the same 'title' as the first...


Graham Bell
EDItEUR

Tel: +44 20 7503 6418

EDItEUR Limited is a company limited by guarantee, registered in England no 2994705. Registered Office: United House, North Road, London N7 9DP, UK. Website: http://www.editeur.org





On 7 Jan 2013, at 18:19, Laura Dawson wrote:

Agreed.

On 1/7/13 12:16 PM, "Philip Schreur" <pschreur@stanford.edu<mailto:pschreur@stanford.edu>> wrote:

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<mailto:tfmorris@gmail.com>>  wrote:

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