OpenFRBR 2.1
I’ve been hacking away the last few days and got a few good things working in OpenFRBR so I called it 2.1 and put it up.
- Click to edit attributes of works and expressions (but reload the page to see the changes in the heading, because I don’t know how to update two elements at once yet). No Submit button necessary, because I use in_place_editor, some Ajax magic.
- You can reassign an expression to a different work using the select menu at the top of the page. Look at the works list and find a work that has one or two expressions. The name (identifier) will end in “novel/1″ or “novel?/2″ or something like that. Look at the work, then look at its expression, then reassign it. Delete the work with zero expressions, if you want. This makes it easier to fix the mistakes made by an FRBRizing algorithm (like the Library of Congress’s, which I used on 160 or so Harry Potter bib records).
- I updated isbn2marc so it uses a WorldCat API key if you have one. This really speeds things up and makes it easier to get lots of MARC records. I originally wrote isbn2marc because I had no access to WorldCat and needed to poll any open Z39.50 server I could find to get MARC records. Now I do have access to it, which is nice, but the script works as well as ever if you don’t use WorldCat. I think I got MARC records at WorldCat for 140 or 150 ISBNs out of the 180 I had, and I found 10 or 20 more at open Z39.50 servers.
There are character set problems but I”m just ignoring them until the next version of Ruby.
Working on this has given me a better idea of what to do next, but what with Christmas and all I may not get much hacking done the next little while. Some parts of the entity relationships aren’t all fleshed in, but I’ll probably take the Work-Expression relation and expose the relation attribute there and make that all nice and editable. After that I could use the same approach for other entities and relationships, that is, doing for the Embodiment relation (Expression-Manifestation) what I do with Reification (what I call the Work-Expression relation). I haven’t documented the data model yet but you can check the source code, or ask.
Bill,
We’ve been working on what we call “cataloger scenarios” on the DC/RDA project, trying to come up with actual cataloging situations that need to get RDA/FRBR coding. If you have a chance, take a look at:
http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/scenarios
The first ones are pretty complex, but I’ve added some less complex ones further on. I think they provide interesting fodder for experimentation with FRBR. And if you have some scenarios you’d like to add, pass them along to me and I’ll upload them. (The wiki software is less than ideal so we aren’t opening it up to public edits.)
Comment by Karen Coyle — 5 December 2008 @ 11:33 amIf you’re not using Prototype/Scriptaculous for your ajaxy magic, you really should be. Although some people swear by jquery instead, which I’ve never used. Either way, a framework like that will take care of cross-browser nightmares for you, along with making it incredibly simple to, say, update two page elements at once.
Comment by Jonathan Rochkind — 5 December 2008 @ 6:24 pmKaren–
I keep an eye on those scenarios! They’re very useful and thought-provoking. At least, I thought I was keeping an eye on them, but I didn’t know you had all of the Turtle representations, with namespaces and all … that’s great stuff. I’ll keep it in mind and come back to it when I’m further on.
Jonathan–
I’m using Scriptaculous, I’m just not very good with it yet. :)
Comment by William Denton — 9 December 2008 @ 11:10 pm