CreativeWork relationships

Triggered by some of the discussion around the recent Audiobook proposal<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2013Sep/0162.html> I posted on behalf of the SchemaBibEx Group(snippet below),  I think we need to address the issue of adding some properties to CreativeWork allowing the description of relationships between CreativeWorks, as a more general issue.

In the Audiobook discussion 'isBasedOn' has been suggested to reference the original literary work.

Within the SchemaBibEx group we have been discussing the relationship between Works (in the FRBR<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records> sense of Work) and examples of that [conceptual] work.  As Karen points out there is some work on Work (from Freebase, Open Library, LibraryThing, WorldCat, etc.) in this area which could benefit from being able to describe relationships they are defining.  As she also points out, apart from these organisations, there is little metadata available yet so we may be in a chicken or egg situation as to adoption.
Draft proposals for this being:

  *   'workExample' - Example/instance/realization/derivation of the concept of this creative work.  e.g..  The paperback edition
  *   'exampleOfWork' - The creative work that this work is an example/instance of.

Karen also suggests a "same work" relationship where you could for instance relate the paperback to the hardback - how about 'sameWorkAs'?

I would support the adoption of all four of these.

Adopting something like FRBR would be too complex for a a general vocabulary like Schema.org<http://Schema.org> - we should be looking for a [smallish] number that will be useful in relating works of many types together.

A KISS approach is desirable, however addressing it piecemeal around individual proposals may not be the simplest way when the core CreativeWork type is probably the best place to add these properties. As they are just as applicable to sculptures and paintings as books movies and audiobooks or even webpages.

I suspect we are looking at a few, more focused, sub-properties of a generic workRelationship property (domain and range of CreativeWork).

Coming to my point in this rambling email.  Can we get a consensus on  a) there being a need to describe relationships between CreativeWorks in this way, and  b) a smallish set would do the job, at least for now.

If we can, could we then run a suggestion and agree/disagree process to try to define that shortish list of candidates.

~Richard

[From Proposal: Audiobook]
That said, we (schema BibEx) are contemplating links between CreativeWorks for those instances where there are identifiers that can be used for that purpose. I think it would be preferable that such linking properties be as general as possible, and one possibility is to allow any number of CreativeWorks to state a "same Work" relationship between them. So all of those editions of Moby Dick can state that they represent the same work (with links between them) or they can all state that they represent the same work described inhttp://en.wikipedia.org/Moby_Dick. If there is a "Work" record (approximating the FRBR sense of Work) then you can declare any edition to the be same work as that record's URL. (Freebase, Open Library, LibraryThing, and apparently soon WorldCat, have identifiers for Work, although their definitions of Work vary among them.) The variety of possible relationships is enormous, and so I think that beginning with a KISS approach while we see how this pans out would be wisest.