Re: BIBFRAME and schema.org

Thanks Karen. I generally concur with your reaction (although I have to
admit that for the first time in my life I was getting hung up on the
_terrible_ kerning of the font in the PDF, so had been reading through it
rather slowly).

I was surprised by many of the statements in the paper about the direction,
decisions, thoughts, and beliefs of the Schema BibEx group. Perhaps if all
(or most) of those statements were modified to say they were the direction,
decisions, thoughts, beliefs "of the OCLC employees currently participating
in the Schema BibEx community" that would be more acceptable--certainly
closer to the truth.

I very much value the opinions (& Richard's leadership) of the OCLC
participants in this group, but cannot endorse this paper as an accurate
reflection of the group's positions, direction, etc as a whole,
particularly with respect to BIBFRAME.


On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:

> Richard, now that I've gotten further along in reading this, I think that
> "posting it to the list" is the least that you should have done. This
> document, written by OCLC and not vetted by this list, attributes to the
> schema bibex group a number of decisions and thoughts that I do not
> recognize. It uses "we" to mean not OCLC but the bibex group. I find this
> more than just problematic - this is at least arrogant and possibly
> dishonest. I now find decisions attributed to this group that I cannot
> condone, yet as a member of the group one could infer that they are mine as
> well.
>
> OCLC cannot speak for this group, and it definitely cannot speak for this
> group in a document that this group did not even see. Godby stated that
> this would be presented at the BIBFRAME session at ALA. If it is presented
> as the thoughts of the bibex group and not OCLC, you should be ashamed.
>
> Here are just a few examples from the document:
>
> "This shift in focus implies a decision by the SchemaBibEx community to
> defer to the important standards initiatives of the library community,
> including BIBFRAME, to develop vocabulary required for detailed
> descriptions of library resources." p. 11 - I do not think we have
> discussed this at all. In fact, we haven't really discussed the
> relationship of schema.org and BIBFRAME in any detail, and I'm not sure
> it is necessarily appropriate for us to do so in this forum. There may be
> some folks on the group who aren't even paying attention to BIBFRAME, but
> who wish to mark up bibliographic displays unrelated to libraries.
>
> "Though the BIBFRAME initiative needs to develop its own policy with
> regard to the Product Types Ontology, the SchemaBibEx community sees little
> need to define and maintain a competing vocabulary for content types and
> carriers." p. 17 - Again, a decision that I do not recall. Also, AFAIK, no
> one except Jeff has promoted the use of the product types ontology, and we
> haven't discussed its use in any detail in the group.
>
> "The SchemaBIBEx community is exploring the possiblity that
> schema:IndividualProduct ... corresponds reasonably well to the definition
> of FRBR Item." p. 17 - We haven't really touched on the item level yet.
> This is one idea, but it is premature to attribute this thinking to the
> group.
>
> "To move forward, two issues must be resolved. First, we must reach
> agreement on working definitions of key concepts. Then we must solve the
> technical problem of mismatched expectations about domain and range
> values..." p. 18 - I object to the use of "we" here because it is talking
> about the work of the SchemaBibEx group, not OCLC. This implies that the
> document is coming from the bibex group, not OCLC. That is not true.
>
> Sorry for the blunt talk, but this document must be re-written to reflect
> that it is the thoughts and opinions of OCLC, not the bibex group. And that
> absolutely must be made clear at ALA.
>
> kc
>
>
>
> On Thu Jun 27 10:41:15 2013, Wallis,Richard wrote:
>
>> Thanks Karen for posting this to the list.  Travelling got in the way of
>> me ensuring that it was published here and on the BIBFRAME list at about
>> the same time.
>>
>> ~Richard.
>>
>> On 27/06/2013 11:59, "Karen Coyle" <kcoyle@kcoyle.net> wrote:
>>
>>  All,
>>>
>>> If you are on the BIBFRAME list you will have seen a message from Jean
>>> Godby with a link to her paper:
>>>
>>> Godby, Carol Jean. 2013. The Relationship between BIBFRAME and the
>>> Schema.org ŒBib Extensions¹ Model: A Working Paper. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC
>>> Research.
>>> http://www.oclc.org/content/**dam/research/publications/**
>>> library/2013/2013-05<http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2013/2013-05>
>>> .pdf.
>>>
>>> This 41 page(!) paper is an excellent analysis of the possible
>>> relationship between BIBFRAME and schema.org. This is a topic which we
>>> have not discussed directly in this group, and I would like to propose
>>> that we could merge this discussion with our consideration of
>>> "instanceOf" and "has Instance" -- which we decided to push to this list
>>> at the end of our last webex meeting on Tuesday, June 25.
>>>
>>> The paper presents the alignment of schema.org and FRBR as a primary
>>> goal of this group [1]. I take exception to that, as may others. But I
>>> believe that the underlying question is the coordination of BIBFRAME and
>>> schema.org, and that should be discussed first. There are obvious
>>> benefits to the library community to bringing these two into alignment,
>>> but we should also discuss whether we can do so without silo-ing library
>>> data once again.
>>>
>>> kc
>>>
>>> [1] "The main objective of the redesign is to improve the representation
>>> of the FRBR hierarchy using concepts already defined in Schema.org.
>>> Since the application of the FRBR hierarchy requires the association of
>>> descriptions with differing degrees of abstraction, the schemaBibEx
>>> community has also proposed the properties hasInstance and isInstanceOf,
>>> whose semantics resemble the BIBFRAME properties with the same names."
>>> (Godby, p. 11)
>>> --
>>> Karen Coyle
>>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>>> skype: kcoylenet
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
> --
> Karen Coyle
> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
>