Allen, Faceted Classification and FRBR
Last month I saw a demonstration of Siderean’s Seamark Navigator, which they call a “relational navigation server” but which you can think of as a sort of RDF search engine. It looked pretty impressive, believe me.
Bradley Allen is the Chief Technology Officer at Siderean, and he was doing some of the demo. There were a couple of questions about FRBR and he gave informed answers. One thing he said really caught my attention and set me to tugging thoughtfully on my beard. He said:
work + facets = expressions = manifestations + tags
By facets he means not the facets that come from a faceted classification system, but the kinds easily divined from MARC records: year of publication, call number range, format (book, music, video, map), language, subject headings, etc.
Last Wednesday in a blog post titled Faceted Classification and FRBR he talks about this after redefining the Group 1 entities!
- An item is a unique physical embodiment of a work (i.e., a singleton set).
- A work is a set of items with the same intellectual content.
- An expression is a set of items with the same realization of intellectual content.
- A manifestation is a set of items with the same production history.
This set of definitions allows us to shift the burden of effort in creating a FRBRized catalog from defining specific entities of the four classes with explicit relationships from one level to the other (which, I believe is the assumed work process) to simple entry of values for facets associated with production, realization and intellectual property metadata on a per-item basis.