Coyle, “Think of what we risk if that theory is wrong”
My colleague Tim Knight reminded me something good. You all know of Karen Coyle. She’s on the RDA mailing list and early in July she said something ominous that will have you musing over the weekend:
We are still having a lot of trouble with FRBR Group 1 entities. This is a good example of what doesn’t work when a standard is defined on rather than in a rigorous, testable way. Until we actually start trying to use FRBR in practice we have no way of testing it to see if the idea really works. FRBR is now almost ten years old and still hasn’t really been tested. It is possible that some parts of it don’t actually work. There are folks trying to express FRBR in RDF, and others working to express it as an object-oriented structure. Both seem to be running into problems (that I cannot claim to understand). I am uneasy about adopting FRBR as the basis for our metadata until it has been proven. I don’t see an obvious mechanism of feedback that would result in adjustments to FRBR if it does turn out to need to be changed. Should we be treating it as gospel? No, at the moment it’s a theory, but still just a theory. Think of what we risk if that theory is wrong.
That’s the last paragraph of her e-mail; for the whole thing, scroll down to 3 July 2007 in this archive file.
Next week, I’ll catch up on pointing out some papers.