Re: Works and instances

Richard, I DO support it (even though I think the Work is a red herring) 
but I also want to support horizontal relationships because in many 
cases the Work data or concept isn't there. (I feel like I keep saying 
this). There is more than one way to combine things, and I think that 
having a "commonEndeavor" property that can connect anything to anything 
will be useful. It would be the equivalent of "similarTo" (but not 
"sameAs").

I guess I just need to add this to the wiki page to make it real to folks.

kc

On 1/7/13 11:21 AM, Richard Wallis wrote:
> Karen,
>
>>>> I'm saying that I don't think that there will be much metadata for Work
> alone, at least not yet."
>
> But there is some, so why prevent people describing it?
>
> You reference library catalogues as not concerning themselves with works
> citing WorldCat as an exemplar of this.  This is the current state of
> affairs but that is not to say that the significant efforts in the library
> community to improve frbr-ish/workish algorithms will not lead to a change
> on this front.  We already see efforts to prevent users being buried under
> long lists of results all with the same author/title.
>
> I agree with you that there are disagreements as to what a Work is - it
> probably always will be that way.  At least if we have a consistent yet
> flexible way of describing a work and its relationships we will have some
> clarity about what is being disagreed about.
>
>> I still argue that that is a minority case.
>
> Nevertheless it is a case, so why not support it?
>
> ~Richard.
>
>
> On 07/01/2013 18:42, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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 19:32:41 UTC