The FRBR Blog

Yakov Shafranovich’s Monday blog post FRBRizing Amazon’s Content is very interesting.

About two weeks ago I accidentally stumbled on a third public service that does something similar. When Amazon launched their Kindle eBook reader they made lots of titles available as a Kindle eBook. HOWEVER, they did not want to change the ISBN numbers for these titles. So what they did is re-organize their catalog is a way that all editions of the same work now appear to be linked to together including audio, eBook, hard cover, etc. This ability is buried in their API right here and is called RelatedItems:

He’s put up bookchaser.com, a tool to compare the results from Amazon, thingISBN, and xISBN.. Compare Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (starting with the ISBN of a Canadian manifestation): 81 results at xISBN, 105 at thingISBN, and 23 at Amazon, or, as Shafranovich calls his application, amazingISBN. On the other hand, here’s a book where Amazon knows more than the other two services.

Martha Yee has made The Concept of a Work for Moving Image Materials, her 1993 (hence pre-FRBR) paper, available. Abstract: “The concepts of work and related work as they apply to moving image works is discussed and recommendations made for their application to moving image materials.”

The RDA-L mailing list is now being nicely archived on the web. You can browse through by thread or date. A good thread to look at, if you’re not on the list, is Cataloger Scenarios Added to Wiki.

David Bigwood noticed that the report of the 21 August 2007 meeting of the Working Group on Aggregates (23 KB PDF) had been posted.

Members and observers discussed the draft of a paper by Ed O’Neill and Maja Žumer. The draft, sent to committee members several weeks prior to IFLA, summarizes the difficulties and inconsistencies in applying the FRBR model to aggregates, and applies three different, previously identified, modeling approaches to two different works: The Deptford trilogy; and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. This draft document represents a response to the previous year’s meeting in Seoul, South Korea, where committee members and observers felt the need to have a document describing different models for aggregates, and also describing the ambiguity of the FRBR model in terms of the treatment of aggregates.

The group briefly deliberated the often-discussed “Universality Principle”, which states that if an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it is a work in all of its manifestations.

… A WG member and an observer noted that we need to define these models in a timely manner, or we could be forced to inherit models that have been defined and applied by innovative creators of library management and e-commerce systems. These software creators might even use hidden organizing principles that would not necessarily work in the best interests of users. The forces that produce these new systems already determine display and access, and we need to determine how best to model and work in these new environments.

Pat Riva, chair of of the FRBR Review Group, sent out this announcement on Tuesday:

The FRBR Review Group and the Working Group on FRBR and CIDOC CRM Harmonisation welcomes comments on FRBRoo (object-oriented definition and mapping to FRBRer) version 0.9 (January 2008) available at: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/FRBRoo_V9.1_PR.pdf and also at: http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/frbr_drafts.html.

This document includes a substantive introduction to the purposes and methodology of the work, a graphical overview of the resulting model, complete FRBRoo class and property definitions, a mapping between FRBRer and FRBRoo, all CIDOC CRM class and property definitions referenced, and an appendix on the modelling of identifier creation.

The goal of the FRBRoo project is to express the conceptualisation behind FRBR using the object-oriented methodology as used in the CIDOC CRM. FRBRoo is defined as an extension to the CIDOC CRM, however, the FRBRoo document is self-contained in that all definitions referenced are included. This has provided the opportunity to verify FRBR’s internal consistency, extend the scope of both FRBR and CIDOC CRM, enable interoperability and extend mutual understanding between the museum and library documentation communities by working towards a common ontology.

Comments on this work are appreciated on an ongoing basis, however, comments received prior to April 21, 2008 will be considered at the next meeting of the Working Group in May 2008.

Please send all comments to:

Pat Riva (Chair, FRBR Review Group) patricia.riva@banq.qc.ca

The slides from Karen Coyle’s talk at the Code4Lib 2008 conference are up: R&D: Can Resource Description Become Rigorous Data? (641 KB PDF). I hope the audio and/or video are available soon. I’d love to listen and/or watch.

Nicolas Morin posted Expérience d’isbn (it’s in French but Google can translate it) on his blog a couple of weeks ago. It’s about looking for

J’ai une édition poche de Madame Bovary dans mon catalogue. Je prends son isbn: à partir de cette information, quelles informations puis-je récupérer à la volée via des web services disponibles ailleurs sur le web pour enrichir l’expérience de l’usager?

[I have a paperback edition of Madame Bovary in my catalogue. I take its ISBN. From this information, what information can I get on the fly via web services available elsewhere on the Web to enhance the experience of the user?]

… une chose est désormais certaine: nous avons de moins en moins un problème de données, nous avons un problème d’outils.

[One thing is certain: we have less and less a problem of data, we have a problem of tools.]

Jonathan Rochkind, systems librarian at Johns Hopkins University posted State of FRBR on his blog Wednesday. He runs through some FRBR stuff that was on his mind, given a recent discussion on the RDA mailing list.

1) Even though FRBR with it’s four Group 1 entities is already considered too complicated by some people (who think we only need three, or two), it’s actually still only a modelled approximation of the complexity of our actual bibliographic/information universe. What we represent will neccesarily be one model, and an approximation….

I actually think we can likely be succesful in getting these other sources to follow the Work-Expression-Manifestation-Item model (because it is useful, and there is nothing competing), or else succesfully translate foreign data to this model. But we aren’t going to be succesful in forcing everyone everywhere to make the same decisions about exactly where work boundaries or expression boundaries are. So an unresolved question and useful research program is: How do we build systems that deal with integrating records from sources that have made _different_ decisions about where work boundaries or expression boundaries are?

IFLA’s put up two versions — I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fully FRBRize what’s going on here — of the 2008 revision of the Final Report on FRBR. The HTML version includes all of the tables, and no longer makes you go to the PDF version to see them.

• 2008 revision of Final Report (HTML, multiple files)
• 2008 revision of Final Report (1.1 MB PDF)

IFLA has published a revised errata sheet, updated last month, for the FRBR Final Report. It corrects some small things.