Quoting Lee Passey <[email protected]>:
> So it seems to me that an OL Work record is best exposed as a FRBR > Expression, and an OL Edition is best exposed as a FRBR Manifestation. I > suspect that there are some attributes|properties that should be moved in > the schema from one record to the other for the best match, but OL has no > real commitment to any specific schema so this could be easily > accomplished. I think this mapping of OL records to FRBR objects is good > enough to go with for the time being. I took another look at the OL Work "type" http://openlibrary.org/type/work I'm not sure if all of the elements there are actually being used, but it seems to me to be a good example of theory v. practice. And more proof that FRBR is a conceptual model, not a data model. The things that don't strictly belong in a frbr:Work description that are in the OL type:work are: original language translated title first publish date cover image first sentence I'm not sure if translated title and original language are being used at this point. Translated title is not = titles of manifestations, but is there because there are people who want to actually translate the titles for users who do not read the language of the Work. (I admit I am somewhat hesitant about this, but some people feel strongly about it.) The first publish date is used in the display of works resulting from a search to give users an idea of the epoch represented by the work. I believe it is in the ol/work because that's more efficient than calculating the earliest date on-the-fly for that particular display. Cover image and first sentence are part of the UI, but not FRBR; there is an attempt in OL to give users something more than just an author and title in the display, something more explanatory, more interesting. I don't see the ol/work as representing the expressions of the work, and at most it could represent the original expression, (a concept which I think is oddly missing from the cataloging rules), not all expressions. So if a work has been translated into 30 languages, this type/work at best could only represent one of them. The others are represented in the type/edition http://openlibrary.org/type/edition which is pretty much = frbr:manifestation+expression. It is expression because it contains the genre (in this case always book) and language, plus any contributing agents (illustrators, translators, etc.), and manifestation because it contains the particular publication details. So the way I read it, the ol/work is frbr:work plus some locally needed elements (that are not being exported in the RDF output), and the ol/edition is manifestation+expression. The only frbr:items represented in the catalog are digitized books, and they are linked from the ol/edition but have their own metadata in the related record in the Internet Archive. As I said above, there is the question of theory v. practice, and we shouldn't expect the internal data format to strictly follow something like FRBR. If only for reasons of efficiency, the internal format may need other elements, such as the links from ol/work to ol/editions (where FRBR only recognizes links from expressions to works, not vice versa). Do not read this as a support of the FRBR WEMI on my part... I am still not at all convinced that the division of entities and the rules for their relationships are viable in practice. I do think it is a good idea to try to understand what the IFLA FR groups are attempting, although I find it to be overly rooted in current cataloging practice. kc -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
