Re: RDA Elements and sub-elements

[Diane I. Hillmann]

Folks:

As an addendum to Jon's post, I'm happy to report that all the areas in 
the RDA elements where the "sub-element" construct exists (e.g., where 
the group of related properties is expected to be collected into a 
composite statement in a particular order) have been updated in the 
manner described by Jon below.

The specific spots in the element set where these occur are:

Dissertation or theses information
Edition statement
Place and date of capture
Production statement
Publication statement
Distribution statement
Manufacture statement
Series statement
Representation of cartographic images

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about these.

Regards,
Diane

Jon Phipps wrote:
Folks,

We're finally getting around to addressing an issue that Alistair 
raised late last year [1].

"...Not directly related to any scenarios, I found that rda:placeOfCapture
is a sub-property of rda:placeAndDateOfCapture, which doesn't look
right. This looks like a case where Tom Delsey's "sub-elements"
pattern got wrongly translated to RDF sub-properties, where rather it
should be modelled in RDF as an n-ary relation."

This resulted in a discussion that culminated in a recommendation [2].

"...
For each RDA element X which has sub-elements Y, Z, ... generate
 an RDFS class C whose name is based on X, state the range of X as C,
 and state the domain of Y, Z, ... as C.

This is exactly what Mikael is suggesting we do, I believe.

E.g. for RDA element "publicationStatement" and sub-elements
"placeOfPublication", "dateOfPublication", I would generate the
following RDF schema fragment:

rda:publicationStatement rdf:type rdf:Property .
rda:placeOfPublication rdf:type rdf:Property .
rda:dateOfPublication rdf:type rdf:Property .
rda:PublicationStatement rdf:type rdfs:Class .
rda:publicationStatement rdfs:range rda:PublicationStatement .
rda:dateOfPublication rdfs:domain rda:PublicationStatement .
rda:placeOfPublication rdfs:domain rda:PublicationStatement .

So we have... 
1. added domain and range to the standard registry schema attributes 
for rdfs:properties and rdfs:subProperties
2. created both a class and a property whenever an rda element is 
composed from 'sub-elements'
3. Made sure that the rda element property has a domain of the element 
class
4. Made sure that the 'sub-element' properties are not sub-properties 
and have a range of the element class

We added some instructions to the class that will help _people_ create 
applications that can construct and parse the composite elements. For 
instance the instructions for Publication Statement are:

"This class has been created to define the Syntax Encoding Scheme for 
the RDA Publication Statement composite string. The Publication 
Statement is composed of an ordered, concatenated list of properties: 
- Place of publication 
- Parallel place of publication 
- Publisher's name 
- Parallel publisher's name 
- Date of publication"

Obviously this draws in some elements of what we often think of as an 
Application Profile, but it doesn't seem out of place in this context. 
One of the goals of the Registry is to act as a bridge between the XML 
document model and the RDF data model and one of the things that's 
also currently missing is a sensible way to express this concept in an 
XML Schema and we hope to pull some of that together as we implement 
AP registration.

Diane is adding/updating the list of element/sub-elements and I'll be 
updating the sub-optimal (to put it mildly) RDF output shortly.

Cheers,
Jon Phipps

[1] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0812&L=DC-RDA&T=0&F=&S=&P=22047 
<https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0812&L=DC-RDA&T=0&F=&S=&P=22047>
[2] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0901&L=DC-RDA&T=0&F=&S=&P=12330 
<https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0901&L=DC-RDA&T=0&F=&S=&P=12330>