The FRBR Blog

Alexander Johannesen, who’s often on about topic maps, the other day “ranted on the NGC4LIB (Next-generation catalog 4 libraries) mailing-list about, uh, something or other.” He turned it into a blog post called Library Pontifications, and he mentions FRBR:

FRBR defines work, expression, manifestation, item, and these are semi-philosophical definitions that we’re supposed to attach semantics and knowledge to. There’s primarily two ways to do that; define entities of knowledge, or create relationships between entities. (Note these two basic ways of doing knowledge management; entities and relationships, as they spring up in all areas of knowledge representation)

Now, can you without looking stuff up tell me the difference between a work and an expression? Or between manifestation and an item? Sure, we can discuss if this or that thing is an item or something else, back and forth, but is that a good foundation upon to lay all future library philosophy? Because that’s just what it is; a philosophical model we use to make sense of the real world. FRBR is confusing, even if it is a great leap forward in epistemological thinking, for example when it comes down to identity management (persistent identifiers for one thing can be expressed through a multitude, like a proxy, which FRBR fails at miserably, for example) it is right there in the centre of it, but a lot of it focuses on the wrong part of it, the part that involves human cognition to make decisions about identity.

Anyway, I guess at this point all I’m trying to say is that there are glimpses of what I’m talking about in the library world, and I was attracted to it, I wanted to dedicate parts of my life to fixing a lot what was broken in the real-world. I came to the library because they are the shining beacon of light in our society.

A paper given by Pat Riva, Martin Doerr and Maja Žumer at the 2008 IFLA conference in Quebec City was published this spring: FRBRoo: Enabling a Common View of Information from Memory Institutions (900 KB PDF) (International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control 38:2, April/June 2009). The PDF is page images so I can’t copy in the abstract, but it’s just five pages and the title explains it. (More on FRBRoo is available online; it’s an object-oriented approach to FRBR.)

Gary Price posted about this in June and pointed it out to me but I’m just getting to it now: Describing the World: Data Model Patterns, a 102 minute Library of Congress webcast done in March 2009. (I still haven’t watched it yet due to technical problems.)

Description: “When an organization is planning to develop or revise the automation of information processing, a typical first step is to analyze the underlying structure of its business. The ‘entity/relationship’ (or simply ‘data’) model is a good vehicle for doing this. What has been discovered over the years is that there are a number of structures that are universal and applicable to all kinds of organizations, both private and public. There are four fundamental categories: People and Organizations, Geography, Physical Resources and Activities and Events. Overlaying all of these are the topics of Accounting and Information Resources. This webcast will also relate this model to the Library of Congress Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).”

The speaker, David Hay, works at Capgemini Financial Services, not the sort of background one usually finds in people talking about FRBR.

While browsing the Zotero Code4Lib group I found this paper added by Mark Matienzo: FRBR as an Interdisciplinary High-middle-range Theory for Information Science — A Theoretical Perspective, by Allen Renear and and Dave Dubin. It was given at a conference last year but I hadn’t come across it before.

ABSTRACT: We suggest that IFLA’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records is an interesting, if unexpected, example of Merton’s “theories of the middle range” and show how theoretical analysis and refinement of such theories can illuminate the deep interdisciplinarity of information science.

… At the very heart of the notion of a middle range theory is the view that they guide empirical research by providing hypotheses for exploration, and by explaining empirically observed phenomena. A full account of FRBR as a middle range theory would therefore naturally focus on these hypotheses, the resulting research, and the effectiveness of the theory in explaining empirical observations. However this topic, as important as it is, and as timely as it is, will not be taken up in here. We focus on a different, and somewhat neglected, aspect of middle-range theories: the role of theoretical analysis and refinement in their conceptual evolution.

I hadn’t heard of Robert K. Merton either, but now I have some good reading ahead and perhaps you do too.

Naming Properties and Relations is a Semantic Webby post from Jeni Tennison.

This post is about how to name properties and relations in RDF schemas. Or rather, about how different ontology developers use different conventions and how this can sometimes be confusing.

… We’re making an explicit distinction within the service between the idea of an item or section of legislation (such as the Criminal Justice Act 1993 Section 67), versions of that legislation (such as the Criminal Justice Act 1993 Section 67 as it was in force on 1st December 2001) and that version formatted in XML, HTML or some other format (such as the XML version of the Criminal Justice Act 1993 Section 67 as it was in force on 1st December 2001).

These three ways of thinking about legislation correspond to the FRBR Work, Expression and Manifestation. So to talk about them in RDF, we use the FRBR vocabulary created by Ian Davis and Richard Newman, in which these classes are called frbr:Work, frbr:Expression and frbr:Manifestation.

Ian Davis left a clarifying comment about his RDF schema, too.

A Skim-Read Introduction to Linked Data, a presentation by Yves Raimond and Michael Smethurst of the BBC, is a good introduction to linked data. It’s just the slides, and the talking would help a lot, but you’ll make do. It’s moderately technical, so it’s not the best introduction for beginners, but have a look.

FRBR is mentioned on slide 92.

OK, this catches up on what I know of from August. Let me know if there’s something I missed.

• Lorcan Dempsey: Worldcat Local usability results and FRBR points to Some Findings from WorldCat Local Usability Tests Prepared for ALA Annual, July 2009 (2.2 MB PDF).
• Mark Matienzo and Jonathan Rockind discuss things FRBRy in the comments on Mark’s blog post “Must Contextual Description Be Bound To Records Description?”
• Two posts from Karen Coyle: FRSAD and What is a (FRBR) Work?
• Robert Ellett, Cataloging Future: FRBR and RDA (940 KB PDF), a talk given at Cataloguing Digital Media: Back to the Future, an ALA preconference in July.

Hi. Sorry about the delay there. What with a vacation and launching a new home page and site template where I work things got busy. My stored Bloglines search for mentions of FRBR etc. went wonky and showed me a bunch of ancient stuff, so I probably missed some things, but I’ll catch up on what I did see over August.

First, IFLA had their annual conference in Milan. Here’s a mix of links thereform:

• FRBR Review Group Meetings
• FRBR Review Group Report of Activities 2008-2009 (40KB PDF).
• Namespace report from Gordon Dunsire. Definitely read this if you’re interested in FRBR and linked data and the Semantic Web.
• FRBR Working Group on Aggregates meeting agenda, with some material for the people there, like this table of differences of the two aggregate models I reported on at the meeting last year.
• FRBR Review Group Wiki. Password-protected.
• FRBR Information Discovery in Traditional Catalogues: The TelPlus Experience (115KB PDF), a talk by Nuno Freire, Rosa Galvão, and Margarida Lopes.
• From FRBR to FRAD: Extending the Model (261KB PDF), a talk by Glenn Patton.
• Frbrisation: Towards a Bright Future for National Bibliographies (100KB PDF), talk by Jan Pisanski, Maja Zumer, and Trond Aalberg.
• Third Edition of UNIMARC Manual: Authorities Format: Implementing Concepts from the FRAD Model and the IME ICC Statement of International Cataloguing Principles (100KB PDF), talk by Mirna Willer.