Renear and Choi, Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models
Allen H. Renear and Yunseon Choi: Modeling Our Understanding, Understanding Our Models: The Case of Inheritance in FRBR (95 KB PDF). In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43. Here’s the abstract:
IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a compelling and influential model of the “bibliographic universe.” However there are interesting variations between FRBR’s formal model and the narrative expositions of FRBR’s authors and explicators - that is, between the formal model and the framework as more broadly understood by the FRBR community. In this paper we argue that despite a widespread belief to the contrary, attribute inheritance down the “hierarchy” of Group 1 entities is inconsistent both with the formal model and with the general spirit of the project. We believe these observations reveal an ongoing uncertainty about the nature of bibliographic entities as well as difficulties in maintaining a clear and exact understanding of the models we are using to represent those entities - even when those models are our own creation.
Here’s the page for the article on the E-LIS site, with the references. I haven’t read it yet, but will post about it when I have. It looks very interesting.
I didn’t find the the presentation convincing. FRBR fits pretty well into inheritance-with-exceptions/prototype system.
For example, knowing that a work has the title “Hamlet” makes it likely that an expression of that work will also be called “Hamlet”. However, some expressions will have other titles; it’s non-monotonic, but what isn’t?
Comment by Simon Spero — 20 December 2006 @ 12:09 amAllan makes a good point here. In taking over the term “inheritance” to describe
the way FRBR interacts with bibliographic records and searching (by this I mean the
common understanding that however a person describes their information need (as a
need for a subject, author, language, form of literature) all one can give a user
is an item, but one can locate suitable items through searching by attributes of
the manifestations, expressions or works) it causes confusion with the meaning of
the term in a formal sense. This confusion may not affect cataloguer’s understanding
of the model much, but thinking of the wrong meaning of a term may actually mislead the systems people that we hope will help us redesign library catalogues to be more useful.
A computer system trying to implement inheritance-with-exceptions would likely not
be that helpful — when is an exception warranted? that goes back to bibliographic
judgement and is likely to be case-by-case.
A good reminder, thanks Allan for this clarification.
Comment by Pat Riva — 2 January 2007 @ 8:36 pm