Re: BIBFRAME and schema.org

The confusion of blame and dishonesty in this thread is massive. Everyone take a breath.

Jeff

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 28, 2013, at 7:14 PM, "Diane Hillmann" <metadata.maven@gmail.com<mailto:metadata.maven@gmail.com>> wrote:

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<mailto:tfmorris@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org<mailto: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