The FRBR Blog

Here’s a draft of a proposal of something called NeT-CEE: Network Tool for Collaborative Electronic Editing over the Internet, which “will enable geographically dispersed groups of humanists to collaborate on editions encompassing text, image, and annotations.” There’s an interesting mention of FRBR in the middle.

NeT-CEE will also support the Classical Text Services protocol (CTS) [64, 63] for organizing, referencing, and querying classical texts. The aim of the Classical Text Services protocol is to define a network service enabling use of a distributed collection of texts according to notions that are traditional among classicists. The CTS adopts and extends the hierarchical scheme of bibliographic entities defined by the OCLC’s and IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, or FRBR. FRBR describes bibliographic records in terms of a hierarchy of Works, each of which is realized through one or more Expressions, realized in turn through one or more Manifestations, realized through one or more Items. CTS implements this hierarchy using the traditional terms Work, Edition or Translation, and Exemplar, while extending the hierarchy upwards, grouping Works under a notional entity called “TextGroup” (corresponding to authors, in the case of literary texts, or any other traditional and useful corpus, such as “Attica” for inscriptions, or “Berlin” for a published corpus of papyri). CTS also extends FRBR’s hierarchy downwards, allowing identification and abstraction of citeable chunks of text (Homer, Iliad Book 1, Line 123), or ranges of citeable chunks (Hom. Il. 1.123-2.22). The CTS protocol allows sharing of information about texts at any level of the conceptual hierarchy, and allows retrieval of sections of an identified text at any hierarchical level supported by its scheme of citation.

I hadn’t heard of the Classical Text Services protocol before. Check out this example from A Guide to version 1.1 of the Classical Text Services Protocol:

So, for example, a TextInventory entry Homer could contain the following information:

TextGroup: tlg0012 (Homer, Homerus, Ὅμηρος)

Work: tlg001 (Iliad, Ilias, Iliade, Ἰλιάς)

Edition: 001 ( ed. T.W. Allen, Homeri Ilias, vols. 2-3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931.)

Edition: 002 (CHS-HMT Iliad, collated against Venetus A and Villoison.)

Online: filename = chs_Iliad_grc.xml

Translation: 001 (CHS-HMT baseline translation.)

Online: filename = chs_Iliad_en.xml

Work: tlg002 (Odyssey) &c

&c.

Very interesting!