- Edward Betts from the Open Library: Works pages live on Open Library staging. Openly accessibly work-manifestation groupings, with work identifiers. In test still. This is big. Here’s Murder On the Orient Express.
- Martin Malmsten, Making a Library Catalogue Part of the Semantic Web, from Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2008. Linked data! Here’s one edition of Murder On the Orient Express in Libris, Sweden’s national union catalogue. In the source is a linked to the same information RDF and you’ll notice “frbr-related” links to other records.
- The FRBRy Variations Digital Music Library System software is now available on Sourceforge! “Variations provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images with a flexible access control framework to ensure respect for intellectual property. In addition to access tools, Variations also includes analysis and annotation tools useful in music teaching and learning. With Variations, institutions can digitize recordings and scores from their own collections and provide those materials to their students and faculty in support of teaching, learning, and research.”
Apropos the Work-Manifestation phenomenon where designers/implementers skip over the FRBR Expression entity – One of the more interesting (and quite neglected) aspects about FRBR is its support of significant ideas from the Cognitive Sciences: (a.) the well-established theoretical and empirical support for “concepts” – as echoed by the FRBR Work entity, and (b.) the less-well known but significant Linguistics research that decouples a more general “languaging ability” from *a given mode* of language. The following quote describes a research program of some 18 years duration (not Chomsky):
” I propose that humans are born with a sensitivity to particular distributional, rhythmical, and temporal patterns unique to aspects of natural language structure, along specific physical dimensions (temporal “sing-song” prosodic patterning and bite-sized, maximally-contrasting syllable segments–both levels of language organization that are found in spoken and signed languages).
…
Put another way, babies are born with a propensity to acquire language. Whether the language comes as speech, sign language, or some other way of having language, it does not appear to matter to the brain. As long as the language input has the crucial properties, human babies will attempt to acquire it.”
You can find out about (a.) by visiting your favorite library, and (b.) by visiting Laura-Ann Petitto’s website at: http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~petitto/langAc.html
So: At what level of Resource description for discovery, access, and use would one distinguish the mode by which a Work (concept) is using one or more modes of language? seems to be the FRBR Expression level of Resource description. FRBR implementations that skip over Expression level engage default assumptions about the nature of language that should be reflected upon more carefully.
Note the effect that a FRBR Expression distinction would have on Resource distribution in the “Orient Express” example. If there is sufficient theoretical justification for Expression level Resource distinction, the question of how to model it for implementation arises. Proper data modeling techniques can support bibliographic Resource descriptions where Expression distinctions may or may not be required.
Comment by Ron Murray — 2 March 2009 @ 3:14 pm