Cowan, Extreme Markup; Ayers; FRPR
First, John Cowan’s Extreme Markup 2007: Thursday, a blog post from 13 August about the Extreme Markup Languages 2007 conference in Montreal.
On Wednesday I talked about the nocturne on naming, but it was actually held on Thursday. Much of it was spent discussing the FRBR model of works, expressions, manifestations, and items. For computer-document purposes, a work is the abstract work, e.g. Hamlet; an expression is a particular kind realization, like a particular edition of the text or recording of a performance; a manifestation is the expression in a particular format such as .txt, .html, .doc, or .avi; and an item is a particular copy residing on a particular server, disk, or tape. Ideally, there should be separate URIs for each of these things.
From there to FRBR, A.L.I.C.E., Organs and Other Extremities, a blog post by Danny Ayers on 15 August. He’d read Cowan’s post, quotes the bit above, and says:
Another paper he mentions talks about describing a pipe organ using topic maps. I need to read this properly sometime soon, there’s an obvious overlap with what I want to do for describing the Tinocaster in RDF (grr, I forgot, that server’s not got its data back yet – link to be fixed soon). As it happens, looking at that took me (with the aid of various Talisians) down the path of using FRBR – how to do a music store, and more generally looking at describing (manufactured) products, prompting the coinage FRPR.
You read that right: FRPR is Functional Requirements for Product Records. Check out the example. Interesting.