Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
Quoting Erik Hetzner ehetz...@gmail.com: frbr (the ontology) describes a person as equivalent to foaf:Person [1] which seems to confirm my opinion. Actually, the way I read it, FRBR and FOAF are entirely different realms, although it is possible that FRBR:Person could be contained within foaf:Person. FRBR states that it does not attempt to define persons EXCEPT as they relate to bibliographic description, which means that it does not exist to describe every person on a social networking site (which FOAF does). Are you saying that there is a usable distinction between: 1. a bibliographic record, and 2. the data contained in that bibliographic record? Yes, and it is usually referred to as administrative data -- that is, data about the record (who created it, when it was last updated), rather than the data about the subject of the record. Sometimes that is contained within the record, sometimes it is contained in a wrapper, as in METS and OAI. kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
2c worth to agree completely with Rob, and to add a little (off topic) broader context. I agree that the underlying person is the same and their bibliographic life and their social life are just two facets which may have some information overlap. Because of the areas we work in as a fed search system, we are working through a new Person data model at the moment which has to handle Person facets of: basic history - born, died, etc.; biometrics - eye color, height; biblio - author, subject; social - network member, friends; education - qualification, institution; employment - organization, position; skills - type, date; life events - type, date; criminal events - incident, location; health event - type, date; financial; military; family; property; and so on (actually, that's about it for now for Persons). We have to try to integrate some combination of the data elements of some of these facets of the person as a whole into whatever the particular use case requires - without re-inventing the (model) wheel each time, and with at least acceptably consistent semantics. Fortunately, Person is by far the most complicated Entity we have to deal with. And what Karen has been going through with the help of this list is very useful input. It gets to be real fun in the outside world - but library skills are invaluable. Peter -Original Message- From: ol-tech-boun...@archive.org [mailto:ol-tech-boun...@archive.org] On Behalf Of Rob Styles Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 11:35 AM To: Open Library -- technical discussion Cc: ol-tech@archive.org Subject: Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing Pre-conceived notions, yes. But the fact that the two vocabularies provide different terms doesn't make the thing a different type of thing necessarily. The two vocabularies provide for describing different aspects of the same thing. Someone can be a person, author a work and be part of a social network all at the same time without it becoming inconsistent. Rob Styles Talis On 7 Jun 2010, at 17:59, Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net wrote: Quoting Erik Hetzner ehetz...@gmail.com: They are different realms of description, but the thing described (a person) is the same in both, as I see it. You may see it that way, but the developers of the two schemas obviously did not because they have almost NO properties in common. The properties define the scope of the entity. I think that we naturally get conned by language, so when we see the term Person we have pre-conceived notions. Those aren't borne out in this case. kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to Ol-tech- unsubscr...@archive.org Please consider the environment before printing this email. Find out more about Talis at http://www.talis.com/ shared innovation™ Any views or personal opinions expressed within this email may not be those of Talis Information Ltd or its employees. The content of this email message and any files that may be attached are confidential, and for the usage of the intended recipient only. If you are not the intended recipient, then please return this message to the sender and delete it. Any use of this e-mail by an unauthorised recipient is prohibited. Talis Information Ltd is a member of the Talis Group of companies and is registered in England No 3638278 with its registered office at Knights Court, Solihull Parkway, Birmingham Business Park, B37 7YB. ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to Ol-tech- unsubscr...@archive.org ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 5:20 PM, Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net wrote: Quoting Jim Pitman pit...@stat.berkeley.edu: The edge case of corporate authors needs to be accomodated. An instructive example is Nicolas Bourbaki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki http://openlibrary.org/search?q=Nicolas+Bourbaki I note that http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL5038897A/Bourbaki_Nicolas_pseud. hints that Nicolas Bourbaki is a pseudonym for an organization, while http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL145730A/Nicolas_Bourbaki does not. More straighforwardly, you may have corporate authors like Committees, W3C, etc. I'd be interested to see how RDF experts would accommodate this fork. I don't know how it is covered in RDF, but as you know in libraries corporate authors are not considered an edge case -- they author huge numbers of governmental publications as well as corporate publications, and rival humans in their output. I agree with Karen that this isn't really an edge case (although Jim's example is one of the more unusual corporate authors). I think you treat it is analogous to the way you deal with human authors -- that is, co-type the author with Organization or Government Agency or whatever else the author represents. Here are some views of what this looks like with multiple types applied: Authors which are Organizations http://www.freebase.com/view/user/tfmorris/default_domain/views/organization_authors (including the famous Nicolas Bourbaki http://www.freebase.com/view/en/nicolas_bourbaki) Authors which are Companies http://www.freebase.com/view/user/tfmorris/default_domain/views/company_authors OL does not store these as authors, however, so we can be sure that all authors are persons, or some other entity presenting itself as a person. That may be the intent, but it isn't the reality today. There are large numbers of corporate authors in the database. Look at the results for this search http://openlibrary.org/search/authors?q=adobe for just a small sample. The FOAF Person does not imply a natural person, and can be used for any assertion of person-ness. The spec says The Person class represents people, which I infer to mean natural people since that's the common usage. I think Person's superclass foaf:Agent may be what you want (it's also a superclass of foaf:Organization and foaf:Group). On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net wrote: Quoting Rob Styles rob.sty...@talis.com: Pre-conceived notions, yes. But the fact that the two vocabularies provide different terms doesn't make the thing a different type of thing necessarily. The two vocabularies provide for describing different aspects of the same thing. How do you know that? Because they both use the word Person? Someone can be a person, author a work and be part of a social network all at the same time without it becoming inconsistent. Of course. But there's a big difference between real life and metadata. True, but the way metadata works in the RDF world is with multiple fragmentary vocabularies which get selected and mixed together when the application is designed. The unfortunately named FOAF vocabulary and the BIO vocabulary both describe different attributes of people. I'd expect an author vocabulary, whatever its source, to describe attributes associated with authoring works and use other vocabularies for other aspects of person-ness or organization-ness. Tom ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 6:39 PM, Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net wrote: The vocab.org FRBR schema was NOT developed by the folks who created FRBR and, IMO, it exhibits some misunderstandings of the intentions of the actual developers. That's right, we developed it back in 2005 before IFLA were interested in RDF. Unfortunately they required that any commercial reuse of the specification or its derivatives should share its revenues with IFLA. We weren't willing to impose those terms on the users of the RDF schema which meant we didn't reuse any of the copyrighted information from the FRBR report, not even the descriptions of the terms. It meant we were cut off from IFLA's input and it also acted as a huge disincentive to pursue the schema any further. I assume the licensing issues have been resolved with the official version and commercial use of the schema is allowed without royalty? Is that correct? Ian ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
Quoting Erik Hetzner ehetz...@gmail.com: In other words, we have a Person (e.g., [2]), a Person as bibliographic entity (as in FRBR), and finally one or more bibliographic records about the person, (e.g., [1]). Do I have that right? I was looking at it that way, in particular because the OL gives subject/person a different ID from author. But then George popped in saying that it would be good for authors and subjects to be the same thing, presumably a person, and since she's the project lead... well, make it so. So I'm coding authors as foaf:persons since that appears to be the desired direction for OL. In general, I consider metadata identifiers to identify the metadata, not what the metadata is about, but that's my personal bias and clearly others feel differently. In my world view, people do not have identifiers, but information about people does. Of course, I live in the city named for Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher whose theories can be summarized as there is no reality, get over it. :-) kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
Again, modelling is a matter of personal judgement and use cases. To me it's quite appropriate to model person-subject and person-person as different entities -- so long as there is also a relationship relating them. It might even be preferable, not sure. Assuming OL _knows_ that a person as a subject is related to the person-as-person (or is that person-as-author?). If the OL database doesn't 'know' this, then there aren't really any options anyway. If it does, I think it's fine to have them be different instances of different entities, so long as they are related by an appropriate relation. Jonathan From: ol-tech-boun...@archive.org [ol-tech-boun...@archive.org] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle [kco...@kcoyle.net] Sent: Monday, June 07, 2010 5:51 PM To: ol-tech@archive.org Subject: Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing Quoting Erik Hetzner ehetz...@gmail.com: In other words, we have a Person (e.g., [2]), a Person as bibliographic entity (as in FRBR), and finally one or more bibliographic records about the person, (e.g., [1]). Do I have that right? I was looking at it that way, in particular because the OL gives subject/person a different ID from author. But then George popped in saying that it would be good for authors and subjects to be the same thing, presumably a person, and since she's the project lead... well, make it so. So I'm coding authors as foaf:persons since that appears to be the desired direction for OL. In general, I consider metadata identifiers to identify the metadata, not what the metadata is about, but that's my personal bias and clearly others feel differently. In my world view, people do not have identifiers, but information about people does. Of course, I live in the city named for Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher whose theories can be summarized as there is no reality, get over it. :-) kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
Hi Karen, Here's the RDF I got back from the link you gave: @prefix rdf: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# . @prefix rdfs: http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema# . @prefix bibo: http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/ . @prefix rdg2: http://RDVocab.info/elementsG2/ . @prefix dcterms: http://purl.org/dc/terms/ . http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A rdg2:biographicalInformation Margaret Mahy ONZ (born i ; rdg2:dateOfBirth 21 March 1936 ; rdg2:identifierForThePerson /authors/OL31800A ; rdg2:name Margaret Mahy ; rdg2:variantNameForThePerson Mahy, Margaret ; dcterms:modified 2010-04-12 12:42:10.448987 ; bibo:uri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mahy; . I'd like to understand if you're modelling this as a person, or as a bibliographic entity as obviously that has implications. Putting aside the possible confusion of pen-names my preference would be to see the author modelled as a person, or an organisation if a corporate author. This should be shown as a type statement so we know which way OL goes. http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A a foaf:Person ; If using foaf Person, it might be better to foaf:name for the name, foaf doesn't include a variant name so you might need to invent that, or where possible you could parse the name into family and given using the foaf properties. I know, names are a can of worms. Having made Margaret a Person, it then wouldn't be right to say that she was modified! You'd have to add in some data about the representation or dataset. http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A.rdf dcterms:modified 2010-04-12 12:42:10.448987 ; dcterms:subject http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A . That date would ideally be typed as well, so we can do date sorting: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A.rdf dcterms:modified 2010-04-12 12:42:10.448987^^xsd:Date ; It would also be good for the date of birth to be formatted and typed as an xsd:Date: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A.rdf rdg2:dateOfBirth 1936-03-21^^xsd:Date ; A further implication of making Margaret a Person is that you can't use bibo:uri, bibo says that things with a uri are either a Document or a Collection, and those are not compatible with also being a Person. Also, uri probably isn't the right term to describe the 'aboutness' of a page. I did think foaf had topicOf, but I can't see it in the spec - but something like http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A foaf:topicOf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mahy Note, the uri is treated as a resource in RDF so goes in rather than quotes. I'm not sure what you mean by: rdg2:identifierForThePerson /authors/OL31800A ; isn't the full uri http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A the identifier for the person? If you do want to model the OL identifier for use in non-uri based systems perhaps then you would also want the scheme the identifier came from, to do that the identifier might need to be modelled separately: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A rdg2:identifierForThePerson http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A#id . http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A#id rdf:value /authors/OL31800A ; rdg2:identifierScheme http://openlibrary.org/identifier-scheme . but I haven't thought that through very thoroughly. rob On 3 Jun 2010, at 16:54, Karen Coyle wrote: There's a first draft of author RDF available. It's live. e.g.: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31800A.rdf I'm looking for a generic URL property for web pages about the author. Ideas? Also, the link property in OL has both the URL and display text. I don't know the best way to do that in RDF, other than to create an xml-ish structure. I used mainly RDVOCAB properties, but could substitute bibo and/or dcterms where they fit, if folks prefer. RDV tends to be more specific (e.g. identifier for the person), but that may be too specific. I don't much care, so state any preferences. Thanks, kc -- Karen Coyle kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 1-510-435-8234 end_of_the_skype_highlighting skype: kcoylenet ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org Rob Styles tel: +44 (0)870 400 5000 fax: +44 (0)870 400 5001 mobile: +44 (0)7971 475 257 msn: m...@yahoo.com irc: irc.freenode.net/mrob,isnick web: http://www.talis.com/ blog: http://www.dynamicorange.com/blog/ blog: http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/ blog: http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/ blog: http://blogs.talis.com/n2/ Please consider the environment before printing this email. Find out more about Talis at http://www.talis.com/ shared innovation™ Any views or personal opinions expressed
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Rob Styles rob.sty...@talis.com wrote: So the question is does OL want to talk about a subject heading and a bibliographic entity that are different things both referring in some way to the same person, or just refer to the same person. Both are possible to model and both are perfectly valid, but having the bibliographic entity and the subject heading does introduce complexity from the library that most people don't immediately understand. I'm not convinced separate entities makes sense even in the context of a library, but it's definitely going to confuse real world users. Intentionally introducing such an archaic concept into a modern design seems wrong to me. For what it's worth Freebase uses a single entry for the author, the book subject, the film subject, the person the glacier was named after, the influencer of other academics, etc. http://www.freebase.com/view/en/knud_johan_victor_rasmussen To my mind, these linkages are where the power is and forcing indirection through an artificial entity like a card catalog card just weakens the linkages and makes them harder to follow. Tom [25 lines of .sig, advertising, and corporate privacy notices elided] ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
Re: [ol-tech] Author RDF for testing
George Oates g...@archive.org wrote: If there's a way to emphasize the person-ness in author RDF in the meantime, I'm all for it. I strongly support this, and encourage adoption of an extensible system of placeholders for author identifiers whenever available. If there is already such a system in place or contemplated, I'd appreciate a pointer. The edge case of corporate authors needs to be accomodated. An instructive example is Nicolas Bourbaki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki http://openlibrary.org/search?q=Nicolas+Bourbaki I note that http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL5038897A/Bourbaki_Nicolas_pseud. hints that Nicolas Bourbaki is a pseudonym for an organization, while http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL145730A/Nicolas_Bourbaki does not. More straighforwardly, you may have corporate authors like Committees, W3C, etc. I'd be interested to see how RDF experts would accommodate this fork. --Jim -- Jim Pitman Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project http://www.bibkn.org/ Professor of Statistics and Mathematics University of California 367 Evans Hall # 3860 Berkeley, CA 94720-3860 ph: 510-642-9970 fax: 510-642-7892 e-mail: pit...@stat.berkeley.edu URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman ___ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
