Re: Works and instances

On 1/7/13 8:35 AM, Tom Morris 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.

LT has both work pages and edition pages. Wikipedia is about the 
original work, with information about editions where relevant. Library 
catalogs, which are a prime first use case already exhibited in 
WorldCat, do not have separate work metadata. If we see this as marking 
up library data, the work is not represented. Online bookstores do not 
have separate work metadata, and they are another obvious use case. I do 
not believe that publisher metadata concerns itself with the Work since 
they are selling specific editions (and wouldn't want to link to a rival 
version of the same text). There are few generalizations that you can 
make in this environment that will be true, and particularly that most 
bibliographic data focuses on 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).

This all depends on your definition of Work. Is a user looking for War 
and Peace looking for the work? If so, it would be legitimate to serve 
up a copy of Voyna i Mir or Guerra e Pace if you are defining Work as 
"the same story." In a public library with only works in English there's 
no problem, but in a large research library with all of the translations 
"workness" may not be user friendly even if well-defined and rigorously 
applied. (The user looking for the English version of Voyna i Mir is 
actually looking for the FRBR:Expression.)

A film archivist has said that director's cut would be a different work 
in their environment. Most of us just want to know if it will play in 
our device.

Already in this discussion we have had people state confidently that a 
book and a movie are and are not the same work. So we can see that there 
will be many different definitions of Work, and that not all 
bibliographic metadata sources use the work concept as part of their 
metadata. Obviously use of "instanceOf" or "versionOf" is optional, but 
it appears that it is only useful when there is a metadata description 
for the Work. I still argue that that is a minority case.

kc

>
>> 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
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Monday, 7 January 2013 18:42:41 UTC