FRANAR Working Group meeting (on FRAD)
Yesterday morning at 8:30 I went to a Web 2.0 discussion group meeting. I missed Karen Coyle (she spoke by webcast or recording, and wasn’t there), and then heard Karen Calhoun (OCLC) talk. Next she, Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix), and Patrick Peiffer (there to speak for Creative Commons) had a panel discussion and took questions from the audience. The panelists were all interesting but as usual some of the same old topics (are libraries still relevant? what is it with tags, anyway?) came up.
After that I went to the meeting of the Working Group on FRANAR, which (there were some name changes) is finishing up work on FRAD: Functional Requirements for Authority Data. They are very close to putting out the final version and wrapping up work.
There were thirteen people at the meeting. Glenn Patton (OCLC) is chair, and he and five others sat at one corner of a large square of tables in a large and otherwise empty room. Two people sat in another corner, I sat alone at the third, and four others clustered at the last. Patton started the meeting, summarized some past activity, and said the goal was for the group to wrap things up soon.
There were a few things to cover based on comments on the last draft:
- They’re going to add a relationship between Family and Corporate Body.
- There was a lengthy discussion about Person-to-Name (or Family- and Corporate Body-to-Name relations) and Name-to-Name relations. The way FRAD works, Person is an entity and Name is an entity. They are related. A Person can have a pseudonym. That is another kind of Name and the relation might be hasPseudonym/isPseudonymOf. But what if a Person has a Name in an early form and another Name in a later form? Are the Names directly related (they are both entities, so they can be) or are they only indirectly related, through the Person? They discussed this kind of thing for almost an hour and a half. Section 5.4 will be changed and some relations pulled out into a new Name-to-Name relationship section.
- Some stuff from the FRSAR meeting was gone over. RDF modelling and reversible relationship names are important. “isKnownBy” is hard to reverse but something like “isAppellationOf” and “hasAppellation” might work. There’s a difference between Major as a title and the role of being a major. And Major as a title is different from Jr. or Sr.
Patton wrapped things up, summarized what remained to be done, and said they’d have the final version ready to present to higher up in the fall. They want to get the final vote on approval done quickly, so FRAD should be all done in a few months, as I understood what was said and how IFLA works.
The sustained mental energy and focus of the people on the Working Group (and two of the observers, who were quite involved) was astounding. They worked for over three hours without stopping and always kept up good spirits. They spent some time on nitpicking details like any group editing a final draft has to, and other time on deep philosophical issues that will underpin cataloguing and authority rules for a long time to come. In my notes I wrote, “These people are incredibly focused. Their attention never flags. This must be what the negotiations about the Treaty of Ghent were like, but with fewer frock coats.”
Another interesting meeting. Keep your eye out for the final FRAD report.