Dan Brickley and the W3C
While searching on “frbr” at Clusty, I came across some e-mail that Dan Brickley sent to the W3C TAG (Technical Architecture Group) mailing list last week: InformationResources, FRBR and googling towards a literature review. It’s part of a thread about the nature of information resources.
While I’m *delighted* that http-range-14 has been defused, I’m really not yet sure that the class “information resource” can be uncontroversially defined without a fair bit of hard work. There’s a big literature around this distinction, eg. see in the digital library world, the debates that spun out of the interaction between Dublin Core (library) and INDECS (rights holder / publisher) metadata efforts….
If the TAG decide to pursue this task, I do recommend that FRBR gets some serious attention, as it has a lot of mind-share in the library and digital library world. My understanding is that FRBR is best thought of as an attempt to come up with a conceptual model that allows information systems to be clear about distinctions such as between different versions of Hamlet, different editions, different physical books and their location in library or who they’ve been lent to, as well as the larger challenge of engaging with complex, composite, mixed-media works.
He throws some cold water on the crossover between FRBR and what the W3C is doing in this subsequent e-mail.
Chris Wilper brought up FRBR on the same list last September, also in a thread about information resources.
It would be exciting if the W3C could make use of FRBR in building the semantic web.