On Wed, November 17, 2010 11:45 pm, Karen Coyle wrote:
> Jonathan, your arguments make sense to me (a human) but unfortunately
> the data you wish to create is not allowed by either FRBR nor RDF --
> perhaps because both are too rigid to do what we need to do.
I cannot speak to the capabilities of RDF, as I believe that the number of
people in the world who actually understand RDF can be numbered with no more
than 2 ditits, but I would suggest that not only is Mr. Rochkind's construct
allowed by FRBR, it is /manadated./
> The FRBR WEMI entities are declared as disjoint in their domains.
> Therefore, if you say:
>
> book23 frbr:hasCreator "Jonathan"
> book23 frbr:hasPublisher "Harper & Row"
>
> you have created a contradiction, because no RDF subject can be both a
> Work and a Manifestation, since those are disjoint.
Are you falling into the "one unit" trap that Mr. Rochkind thought I was
subject to? Why do you feel that both of these data points must be represented
in a single object?
Assuming that "book23" is a manifestation, /I/ would represent your example as:
person23 frbr:Name "Jonathan Rochkind"
work23 frbr:hasCreator person23
expression23 frbr:expresses work23
expression23 frbr:hasTitle "A treatise on the correct use of the FRBR Model"
book23 frbr:manifests expression23
book23 frbr:hasPublisher "Harper & Row"
book24 frbr:manifests expression23
book24 frbr:hasPublisher "Random House"
Five Entities representing two Manifestations of a single Work with no
redundant data. Seems perfect to me.
> The statement
> book23 frbr:hasCreator "Jonathan"
> in RDF declares by inference that book23 is of the domain that has
> been defined for the predicate property. These rules mean that you
> cannot mix and match properties between WEMI, assigning them to the
> same identified "thing."
Correct. You assign a property to the appropriate "thing" and then you build
relationships that tie the "things" together in different ways. This way you
can avoid inconsistent, redundant data.
> This is one of the main objections I have to
> WEMI. It would be great if the assignment of properties to one of WEMI
> would be optional, but RDF does not appear to have that concept.
If RDF cannot express FRBR/WEMI properties and relationships then it seems to
me that RDF is broken, not FRBR/WEMI. Do not conflate the two, they are
orthogonal systems.
It is certainly possible to express the foregoing in a single "unit" using
generic XML, so I presume it should be possible to do so using the RDF
vocabulary. Consider this, in which the relationships are implicit:
<theWholeThing>
<frbr:Manifestation id = "book24">
<frbr:Manifestation.Publisher>Random House</frbr:Manifestation.Publisher>
<frbr:Expression id = "expression23">
<frbr:Expression.title>The correct use of FRBR</frbr:Expression.title>
<frbr:Work id = "work23">
<frbr:Person id = "person23" rel = "frbr:IsCreatedBy">
<frbr:Person.name>Jonathan Rochkind</frbr:Person.name>
</frbr:Person>
</frbr:Work>
</frbr:Expression>
</frbr:Manifestation>
</theWholeThing>
Or this, in which the relationships are explicit:
<theWholeThing>
<frbr:Person id = "person23">
<frbr:Person.name>Jonathan Rochkind</frbr:Person.name>
</frbr:Person>
<frbr:Work id = "work23">
<frbr:IsCreatedBy ref = "#person23" />
</frbr:Work>
<frbr:Expression id = "expression23">
<frbr:Expression.expresses ref = "#work23" />
<frbr:Expression.title>The correct use of FRBR</frbr:Expression.title>
</frbr:Expression>
<frbr:Manifestation id = "book23">
<frbr:Manifestation.manifests ref = "#expression23" />
<frbr:Manifestation.Publisher>Random House</frbr:Manifestation.Publisher>
</frbr:Manifestation>
</theWholeThing>
In my mind, both of these examples express a comlete FRBR/WEM representation
of a Manifestation. Is RDF incapable of this same sort of expression? Not only
could I parse and generate either of these examples back and forth losslessly,
I could probably map them back and forth to a MARC record (although possibly
not losslessly).
I find it hard to believe that FRBR + RDF is not flexible enough to mimic this
kind of encoding, but then, as I repeatedly point out I don't really
understand RDF.
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