Last Week in FRBR #19
What do you want in the Open Library Works API?
In Works API, sent to the code4lib mailing list, Karen Coyle asks:
Open Library now has Works defined, and is looking to develop an API for their retrieval. It makes obvious sense that when a Work is retrieved via the API, that the data output would include links to the Editions that link to that Work. Here are a few possible options:
- Retrieve Work information (author, title, subjects, possibly reviews, descriptions, first lines) alone
- Retrieve Work information + OL identifiers for all related Editions
- Retrieve Work information + OL identifiers + any other identifiers related to the Edition (ISBN, OCLC#, LCCN)
- Retrieve Work information and links to Editions with full text / scans
Well, you can see where I’m going with this. What would be useful?
Reply on the list, or e-mail Karen Coyle, with your answer.
In a follow-up message Coyle gives this immortal line (to Ed Summers): “I’ll need you to be a little more -v on this one.”
More from lengthy code4lib thread
A couple more things from Variations/FRBR project relases FRBR XML Schemas, a long thread on the code4lib mailing list. Karen Coyle said in one message something that caught my eye (not surprising — most of her e-mails have something like that):
One thing I am finding about FRBR (and want to think about more) is that one seems to come up with different conclusions depending on whether one works down from Work or works up from Item. The assumption that an aggregate in a bound volume is an Expression seems to make sense if you are working up from the Manifestation, but it makes less sense if you are working down from the Work. If decisions change based on the direction, then I think we have a real problem!
Matthew Beacom replied in part:
The direction one moves in with the WEMI/IMEW model doesn’t change the of using the model in the way you mean. It doesn’t invalidates the model or shows a serious problem with the model. It shows that people can often trace complexities of relationships in one direction better than they can in another. So it is a good practice to use the model in both directions when trying to understand it or apply it.
That’s the opening of a long and thoughtful post. If you missed some of the thread, work your way through. It seems to have died now so there is an end.
OAI-ORE and FRBR
Pointer to FRBR, a message on the OAI-ORE mailing list
Given the 1:M relationships between FRBR group 1 entities, if I want to completely model a FRBR hierarchy for a work in OAI-ORE, I need at least 4 resource maps: 1 work-level resource map to aggregate expressions, an expression-level map for aggregating manifestations, a manifestation-level resource map to aggregate items and at least 1 item-level resource map to aggregate the actual content for a particular item.
For games where there are significant issues around editions (and there’s a lot of those in the world), this actually works as a pretty good way to model things, making it easy to add new resource maps for particular editions/revisions, new copies of items, etc. as they come along. But there are some games where the situation is much simpler, and there’s not a lot of reason to have work/expression/manifestation resource maps around, because all I have is one item and that’s all I’m likely to ever have.
In those cases, how evil would it be of me to have an item-level resource map indicate that it is aggregated by manifestation/expression/work aggregations that actually don’t have resource maps?
You’ll be glad to know that according to the one person who replied, it wouldn’t be evil. Whew!
DOMS Project
DOMS, the Digital Object Management System (built on Fedora) has some FRBR stuff on its web site: FRBR Relations, How to Use FRBR.
Ibbo, A Generic JPA realisation of the FRBR Model?
I don’t know what JPA is, but Ian Ibbo posted A Generic JPA Realisation of the FRBR Model?
After a couple of hours hacking on saturday I arrived at a point that needed some test data. What to reuse? I figured I could just throw together my usual collection of cybernetics books and use that. What data model? FRBR is getting some air-time at the moment. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just pick up a JPA definition of the FRBR model and drop it into your project? I thought so.. But a look around didn’t yield anything I could reuse. Since my test data really only needs work/creator at the moment, I’ve created some classes under org.frbr.datamodel, pasted a GNU affero license on it, and whacked it out there in the public domain. Think maybe this needs to live at sourceforge, but I don’t fancy going through the hell of that just for giggles. The sourcecode is here for now: http://developer.k-int.com/svn/default/sandbox/frbr_rel_model (Can be svn checked out from this address too). If this is something of interest, prod me and I’ll get it up on sourceforge and share out the permissions.
Yelton, In Which FRBR Clarifies My Thinking on Citation Styles
Last week Andromeda Yelton posted In Which FRBR Clarifies My Thinking on Citation Styles.
Back when electronic content was starting to explode, lots of citation styles were getting all persnickety about how to cite the electronic vs. the paper version of different things, and which database it came from, and all this crud. And I was thinking, why? Do I care? Does it really matter where I found an article? What possible way does its provenance matter to my argument?
In other words, I’m really not interested in item- or manifestation-level citations. The kind of arguments I make — the kind of arguments people in most disciplines, I think, make — are expression-level, caring only about the content in question and not the particular form in which it’s realized.
edsu and ostephens
There was a bit of interesting stuff between Owen Stephens and Ed Summers on Twitter, where they had a short exchange about what was expressed by Work-level information in Open Library. Summers used a command-line RDF tool to investigate. I wanted to show the exchange here. I had Stephens’s Twitter page in a tab, but after restarting Firefox a couple of times it all got lost and it would take me too long to go back and find it all. How can someone easily go back and track a Twitter exchange between two people that happened a week ago?