Re: BIBFRAME and schema.org

Folks:

While not trying to exacerbate the already difficult conversation here (and
not having been as closely watching the bibex effort as Karen has), I'd
like to make a few comments that I hope won't be interpreted as hostile. I
would have to say that, based on my understanding, I believe Karen is
correct in chastising OCLC (primarily Richard, I believe) for stepping over
the boundaries of good process and honest dealing. Let me point out here
that Richard's title is "Evangelist", and it might be that he is acting as
such in this case, but that ought to be clear, if so. I've done some
evangelism in my time, though without the benefit of a title that makes my
goals explicit, so I'm hardly one to cast stones on that basis. There's a
place for evangelism, but not everywhere, all the time.

As for Jeff's label of "hostile" and his apparent surprise that anyone
would dare question the purity of OCLC's motives in this case, I can only
offer a virtual rolling of eyes.  Some of us are old enough to have
witnessed some questionable actions on OCLC's part (particularly at least
two instances of attempting to declare ownership of data contributed to
OCLC), and we can hardly be expected to deny that experience.

Like Karen, I'm distressed that Jean Godby might be tarnished by this--the
report itself is a model of it's kind, well written and certainly up to
Jean's usual standard. Speaking for myself, I have one additional factual
quibble. Though happy to see any mention of RDA in the report, it states:

"The proposed schemap: properties hasInstance and isInstanceOf associate
descriptions in the same hierarchy and are analogous to schema:Model.
Another proposed property, commonEndeavor, defines a relationship between
entities in different hierarchies whose content is derived from the same
creative act. In this example, commonEndeavor can be interpreted as a cover
term for an RDA relationship designator such as Motion Picture
Adaptation Of, which might be more descriptive in this context.
Unfortunately, most RDF implementations of RDA relationships require a
domain and range explicitly defined as FRBR entities, so they are formally
incompatible with descriptions of schema:CreativeWork unless some technical
adjustments are made. The implementation of RDA described in the Open
Metadata Registry has this constraint, but so do many others."

The OMR contains both a FRBR constrained set of properties, but also an
unconstrained set, designed to be used in cases where FRBR constraints are
unwelcome, including in mapping situations.

Sadly, politics are not easily expunged from these conversations,
primarily, I think, because there are agendas aplenty floating barely
beneath the surface. I find that the occasional deep breath, meditative OM
and repetition of  "it's just another format" helps a lot.

Diane


On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 6:01 PM, Tom Morris <tfmorris@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> It's included in the Freebase RDF dump, but not in an easily interpretable
> way (ie as RDFS or OWL).  Probably the most accessible way to view it is
> online at the web site.  You can either start with an instance like the
> Little Mermaid and click on the associated types e.g.
> https://www.freebase.com/book/book?schema= or you can start at a domain
> like https://www.freebase.com/book?schema= and browse from there to the
> associated types, properties, and instances.
>
> Pretty much everything should be clickable so, in the schema view, you can
> click on the target type of a property (ie its range in OWL terms) to see
> what properties that type has.
>
> One advantage, I find, of viewing the schema and instances together is
> that you can see how the types are used, which ones are well populated and
> which ones aren't, etc.
>
> The other domains which might be of interest include:
>
> https://www.freebase.com/media_common?schema=
> https://www.freebase.com/film?schema=
> https://www.freebase.com/music?schema=
> https://www.freebase.com/visual_art?schema=
> https://www.freebase.com/opera?schema=
>
> Let me know if you have any questions.  I don't work for Google, but I'm
> pretty familiar with both the Freebase schema and data.
>
> Tom
>
>