Hawkins, FRBR Group 1 Entities and the TEI Guidelines
Kevin Hawkins gave a talk earlier this month at the 2008 Annual TEI Members Meeting: FRBR Group 1 Entities and the TEI Guidelines (50 KB PDF). Slides for the talk are also available (288 KB PDF).
When speaking about literature or about text encoding, we sometimes use terms like work, text, and document quite loosely—so loosely, in fact, that you could hold an entire graduate-level seminar or publish a whole book to discuss the meanings of these three words. While lexical ambiguity is a common feature of human language, loose usage may point to a deeper ontological ambiguity—or simply a lack of clarity—over what is being discussed. The various members of a bibliographic family are confused not only by novice text encoders but also, I believe, by the many contributors to the TEI guidelines. Clarifying this confusion over what is the object of encoding may help us to get around some of our persistent problems in applying TEI markup and lead to texts that are more machine-readable than at present.
While there are many ontologies of bibliographic families, for this analysis I will apply the FRBR model to TEI text encoding.
TEI is the Text Encoding Initiative, and if you don’t know it, this section of their guidelines will give you an idea of how they’re marking up novels, poetry, plays, essays, nonfiction, etc.
Also, back in August, Hawkins gave a talk at Modern Information Technologies and Written Heritage: From Ancient Texts to Electronic Libraries in Russia.
- Entailment of Entities and Implicature of Attributes in the FRBR Model (72 KB PDF)
- Логическое следование сущностей и импликатура атрибутов в ER-модели «Функциональных требований к библиографическим записям» (Russian translation, 217 KB PDF)
- Slides for the talk (English) (159 KB PDF)