RE: BIBFRAME and schema.org

Tom,

Do you know if Freebase has a dump of their schema? I poked around on https://developers.google.com/freebase/data, but couldn't find one.

Jeff

From: Tom Morris [mailto:tfmorris@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 28, 2013 1:26 PM
To: Dan Scott
Cc: Young,Jeff (OR); Ed Summers; Shlomo Sanders; public-schemabibex@w3.org
Subject: Re: BIBFRAME and schema.org

The Freebase schema is worth reviewing for those who aren't already familiar with it.  It attempts to strike a balance between information modeling purity and real world practicality.

On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Dan Scott <denials@gmail.com<mailto:denials@gmail.com>> wrote:

During the last call, I proposed (via chat) that Freebase's
adaptedWork / adaptedFrom properties might make more sense than the
proposed hasInstance / isInstanceOf for expressing relationships
between CreativeWorks. I'm not sure we really need a Platonic ideal /
FRBR Work in schema.org<http://schema.org>; it seems to be a potential rat hole that
would be better avoided, as the abstract "Work" is subject to
revisionism and argumentation for little benefit to the linked data
effort.

For example: would the abstract CreativeWork for "The Little Mermaid"
be the Disney creation? Surely not; it would be the Hans Christian
Andersen work on which the Disney story was based, but it would not be
the English translation; it would be "Den lille havfrue" - but wait,
Andersen's work doesn't even include "Ariel" as a character's name,
and surely the vast majority of people looking for "The Little
Mermaid" actually want the Disney films / books / tv series / video
games / figurines / stickers / whatever... and perhaps at some point
in the future we will discover that Andersen's work was based on a
previously existing oral tale. Do we even want to try to have to
express that, and maintain that, when it seems much better suited to
the realm of historical literature academics & their research papers &
books & conference proceedings?

In short, I don't think an abstract CreativeWork and all of the FRBR
Work baggage that would carry offers significant benefits to our
efforts. I, for one, would be happy to link off to, say, the wikipedia
page on "The Little Mermaid" (either
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(1989_film) or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(franchise) or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid_(disambiguation)) or
their Freebase equivalents, and let the linked data lead interested
parties to explore the connections and arguments further.

Here's the Freebase equivalent of the first (the work): http://www.freebase.com/m/01rx7z
with names in 27 languages: http://www.freebase.com/m/01rx7z?i18n=<https://www.freebase.com/m/01rx7z?i18n=>
and links to 25 Wikipedias
links to 4 adaptations (Disney, anime, another animated film, & a stage production): https://www.freebase.com/m/01rx7z#/media_common/adapted_work
14 book editions (which are, in turn, linked to OpenLibrary, Google Books, etc): https://www.freebase.com/m/01rx7z#/book/book

The Freebase schema treats editions, adaptations, and translations as separate kinds of links and this seems more natural to me than smushing them altogether.  A book edition and a film adaptation are very different beasts.  Adaptions can be to/from any media and can be anything from remakes to works only loosely based on an original. Foreign language book editions are linked both to the abstract work and to a translation node that contains information about the translator, target language (probably need a picture here), although this isn't well populated in the current data because the information isn't typically available in machine readable form.

The author's page: http://www.freebase.com/m/03j90 in addition to being linked to 41 Wikpedia's is linked to the LC NAF, OpenLibrary, NNDB, IMDB, NY Times, MusicBrainz (for spoken word recordings), VIAF, and a bunch of book sites.

As Freebase, Wikidata, DBpedia, etc make progress, this tapestry of connections will get richer and richer.  I'd argue that what people want is a way to access and connect to this tapestry, not a separate "library" view of the world.

Tom