Re: Bibliographic Record Schema

Hi Richard,

On the data model issues, I wondered if you had looked at the
"Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records" (FRBR) document
published by IFLA

http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm

This work has been highly influential in recent work on bibliographic
metadata. And although it is presented as an entity-relation model, I
believe there has been work on representing the FRBR model in RDF. 

I wondered whether looking at FRBR might help clarify some of the
relationship issues that Morten referred to in his comments on the
"distance" between nodes in some of your examples? (And it might also be
a good thing to show awareness of in your dissertation ;-))
 
e.g. I think (but I'm not 100% sure) your bib:Citable class would
correspond to a FRBR Expression (or maybe a Work?), and the (untyped?)
object of your bib:pub_details property would correspond to a FRBR
Manifestation. (The FRBR model describes the relation between Expression
and Manifestation as "is embodied in", with inverse "is embodiment of".
FWIW, I think you could probably use the Dublin Core property
dcterms:hasFormat to represent that relationship, if you preferred to
reuse an existing property rather than coining your own.)

More specifically on the RDF/XML examples, as Morten already pointed
out, there are a few syntactic glitches in the examples ("rdf:Resource"
etc).

I was also a bit unsure about your convention for lists of contributors.
e.g. in example A.2

<bib:Citable rdf:about="#Flo+Dam:JFP-ta">
 <dc:title>Linearization of... </dc:title>
 <bib:contributors rdf:parseType="Resource">
   <rdf:li><marcrel:aut rdf:Resource="#Florido" /></rdf:li>
   <rdf:li><marcrel:aut rdf:Resource="#Damas" /></rdf:li>
 </bib:contributors>
</bib:Citable>

Even with the "rdf:Resource" corrected to "rdf:resource" I don't think
this is valid RDF/XML. I wondered whether maybe you intend something
like:

<bib:Citable rdf:about="#Flo+Dam:JFP-ta">
 <dc:title>Linearization of... </dc:title>
 <marcrel:aut>
   <rdf:Seq>
     <rdf:li rdf:resource="#Florido" /></rdf:li>
     <rdf:li rdf:resource="#Damas" /></rdf:li>
   <rdf:Seq>
 </marcrel:aut>
</bib:Citable>

in the vein of example 2.2.3 in
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml/ ?

Cheers
Pete
------- 
Pete Johnston 
Research Officer (Interoperability)
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK 
tel: +44 (0)1225 383619    fax: +44 (0)1225 386838 
mailto:p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk 
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/

Received on Thursday, 3 June 2004 07:01:38 UTC