Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
I'm curious why you think that doesn't work? Isn't "place of publication"
a characteristic of a particular manifestation? While, "title", according to
traditional library practices where you take it from the title page, is also
a characteristic of a particular manifestation, is it not? ("uniform title"
is _usually_ a characteristic of a work, unless we get into music cataloging
and some other 'edge' cases. Our traditional practices -- which aren't
actually changed that much by RDA, are rather confusing.)
Well, I was responding to Ross' statement that bibo and FRBR could be used
in combination, depending on whether one was at that moment describing
'bibliographic things' or 'work things'. bibo doesn't have a uniform title,
so the question is: can you use a bibo title and say that it is a work
title? I thought that Ross was indicating something of that nature -- that
you could have a FRBR 'work thing' with bibo properties. I'm trying to
understand how that works since Work is a class. Don't you have to indicate
the domain and range of a property in its definition?
RDA tries to solve this by creating different properties for every
concept+FRBR entity: title of the work (Work), title proper (Manifestation).
[I don't understand why expressions don't have titles.... a translation is
an expression, after all.]
I am confused about what one would do about the fact that RDA defines
attributes a bit different than FRBR itself does. It's not too surprising --
FRBR is really just a draft, hardly tested in the world. When RDA tried to
make it a bit more concrete, it's not surprising that they found they had to
make changes to make it workable. Not sure what to do about that in the
grand scheme of things, if RDA and FRBR both end up registering different
vocabularies. I guess we'll just have two different vocabularies though,
which isn't too shocking I guess.
I'm not sure there's anything to do, but I do know that the developers of
RDA feel very strongly that in RDA they have 'implemented' FRBR, so we have
to find a way to integrate FRBR and RDA in the registered RDA vocabulary. I
agree that there's no problem with having RDA and FRBR as two different
vocabularies, it's the effort of bringing them together that boggles me. I
feel like it leaves a lot of loose ends. I'd be happy to see FRBR revised,
or to have it re-defined without the attributes, thus allowing metadata
developers to use the bibliographic relationship properties with any set of
descriptive elements.
I'm having trouble with the FRBR Group 1 entities as classes. I see them
instead as relationships, and vocab.org does seem to treat them as
relationships, not as 'things.' I see a distinct difference between a person
entity and a work entity, because there is no thing that is a work. I see
work as a relationship between two bibliographic statements. (This is vague
in my mind, so I won't be surprised if it doesn't make sense....) As an
example, if I have a group of bibliographic properties, say an author and a
title, and I say:
Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann --> expresses --> Der Zauberberg, by Thomas
Mann
then I have created an 'expression to work' relationship, and so Der
Zauberberg is a Work. If I do this, I don't need an explicit Work title. If
I have a badly created Manifestation that has on its title page: Magic
Mountian, I can do:
Magic Mountian, published by x in y --> manifests --> Magic Mountain, by
Thomas Mann --> expresses --> Der Zauberberg, by Thomas Mann
In this way, I don't have to declare different title elements with different
domains/ranges (which is essentially what RDA does in an awkward way) to
connect them to the FRBR Group 1 classes, and the FRBR properties become
more usable because you don't have to declare your bibliographic properties
in terms of the FRBR classes. Now, IF you can use any properties, say,
dcterms:title, with the FRBR properties, like "manifests" then the whole
thing is solved. I think it works that way, but that is definitely NOT what
RDA has done; it has incorporated the domain (FRBR class) in the
bibliographic properties. I think that what I describe above in my examples
works; and if it does, then the problem is with RDA.
In the end, it's the relationship between properties and classes in FRBR and
RDA that is giving me a headache, and the headache mainly has to do with
FRBR group 1. I think this is my bete noir, and so I will now go read
something soothing and let my blood pressure drop a bit.
kc
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kco...@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
