The FRBR Blog

Morbus Iff took an interest in FRBR a few years ago and began some work on it, making a start on a Drupal (a web site content management system) module that would use it: LibDB. As the datestamps show, he abandoned it, as often happens.

But he says, “I never stopped thinking about it.” In Drupal 7 and FRBR: A Mental Model, he puts down what he’s been thinking about regarding getting FRBR into the newest version of Drupal. (Which from what little I know is going to be really good.) It’s Drupal-heavy, so if you don’t use Drupal you might get confused.

Drupal 7 is “nearing” release and I’m once again thinking about FRBR. 7 now has the ability to add custom fields to its content types, functionality that previously required the contributed module CCK. While CCK, as a framework, had tons of additional third-party modules that mocked up different types of fields, Drupal 7 doesn’t, solely because it isn’t in the wild yet. I don’t consider this bad news, really, because I’ve always been of the opinion that most of the contributed modules available to Drupal are crap. They scratch itches, certainly, but very few of them are what I’d consider quality productions. So, for me, thinking about Drupal 7 and FRBR is thus constrained to “core” and “my own custom code”. Primarily, I’m interested to see just how much of FRBR could be modeled without custom code at all, so I’ve made some odd decisions to accentuate this. One could even accuse me of “just” making a boring old cataloguing system: regardless, I’m doing it with FRBR’s model fully in mind.

Lots of people have been linking to Rob Styles’s Bringing FRBR Down to Earth.

Wuthering Heights is a work by Emily Bronte, realized in a written expression of the same name. The written expression is embodied in several different manifestations each of which is exemplified by many items, one of which I hold in my hand.

… The difficulty I, and I suspect many others, have is that I don’t ever use any of those words. They’re too abstract to be useful. FRBR generalises its model and in that generalisation loses a great deal. Let’s talk about it using more natural language.

Wuthering Heights is a story by Emily Bronte. It was originally published as a novel in 1847 and has subsequently been made into a movie (several times) and re-published in many languages beyond its original English. It has been republished in many editions and as a part of many collections. It features several fictitious people including Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. The author, Emily Bronte, had sisters who authored several other novels, though she authored only this one. Emily Bronte is also the subject of several biographies. I have the paperback in my hand right now.

I don’t have any of those problems and think FRBR as it is, with extra labels for things, handles the situation quite clearly. Rob’s more human-readable version could easily be modelled by FRBR and using those words without the WEMI structure would confuse things. But then, I edit this blog, and I’m definitely not one of the many others who don’t ever use those words, so who knows?

The Difference Between AACR, LOC, DDC, FRBR, CCO, MARC and RDA, a blog post by Suzie Pocatligo at her blog How to Catalog a Hiccup. (“How to Catalogue a Hiccough”?) It does what it says on the tin.

James Weinheimer‘s post Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web kicked off a very interesting discussion on the ngc4lib mailing list about the FRBR user tasks, the Semantic Web, the RDA vocabulary that will let people use RDA on the Semantic Web, and more. Check out the archives to read it and don’t miss where Shawne Miksa starts a new thread on User Tasks–Outdated? Why?

Jonathan Rochkind, Karen Coyle, Diane Hillmann, Eric Lease Morgan are all there, so you know it’s going to be informed, opinionated, lively, intelligent, and just the kind of thing where you wish everyone was sitting together over a drink.

If you’re not on ngc4lib, consider joining.

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.

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.

Diane Hillmann posted FRBR vs. FRBR-ization on the blog she does with Jon Phipps:

… In contrast, FRBR-ization only exposes what we can assert based on a mapping from MARC to FRBR (or RDA), which is at best the relationships between the FRBR Group 1 entities: the Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item. With the RDA array of identified relationships, we have a whole lot more. I suppose one could say that these are not necessarily part of the FRBR panoply, but if you consider them the “horizontal” relationships that fill in between the “vertical” relationships that Work, Expression, Manifestation and Item provide, then it’s possible to see how these relationships are enabled by the way the FRBR model has allowed us to rethink our world.

This is one of the issues that makes my head hurt when I think about the RDA “testing” regime that we keep hearing about. Are we wedded to the notion that if it can’t be crammed into MARC we aren’t going to use it? Can’t we start to think about MARC as a fairly lossy output format and move on to something that expresses the relationships we know will help us maintain some important functionality and credibility in the broader data world?

MARC as “a fairly lossy output format.” Preach it.

Quick pointer to Karen Coyle’s blog post Yee on RDF and Bibliographic Data. (That’s Martha Yee.)

The difficulty that I am having at the moment is that it appears to me that there are some fundamental misunderstandings in Yee’s attempt to grapple with an RDF model for library data. In addition, she is trying to work with FRBR and RDA, both of which have some internal consistencies that make a rigorous analysis difficult. (In fact, Yee suggests an improvement to FRBR that I think IFLA should seriously consider, and that is that subject in FRBR should be a relationship, and that the entities in Group 3 should be usable in any relevant situation, not just as subjects. p. 66, #6. After that, maybe they’ll consider my similar suggestion regarding the Group 1 entities.)

Hi. Got a bit busy with things and had to let the FRBR Blog slide for a bit. This is a good time to say that in June this blog will be four years old and I don’t intend to keep on with it as it’s been. When I started this back in 2005, there wasn’t much talk about FRBR and there was no easy way to keep track of what was going on. Now there is a lot of talk about FRBR in the library world and a growing amount outside in the general web world. I want to stop trying to keep an eye on everything going on and dig deeper into a few things that interest me. Should this stay as a blog but open up to lots of contributors? Should frbr.org become something entirely different? If you have any thoughts, let me know in a comment or by e-mail.

Now, to catch on a few things.

• OpenFRBR is down. I hadn’t built in any restrictions on who could add or edit content so spammers were at it so hard they were really slowing down the server. I’ll let you know when it’s back up with some kind of spam protection.
• Ross SInger and I are going to tackle getting OpenFRBR to work in a Semantic Web/linked data way. More on this as it develops. There was a lot about linked data at Code4Lib 2009 and I’m excited about this approach.
• Definition of FRBR, a message sent to the AUTOCAT mailing list by Julie Hankinson, got a big discussion going. “How would I define FRBR for a non-cataloger? It’s one of those concepts–we all know what it is, but how do we explain it?” Lots of replies, some quite lengthy. Good thread.
• Two talks last week at the New England Technical Services Librarians 2009 conference: Metadata is a Plural Noun (9.5 MB PPT) by Karen Coyle (“From library catalog to LOD [linked open data], FRBR leads the way”), and Rick Block on RDA: Boondoggle or Boon? And What About MARC? (Via Christine Schwartz.)
• Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA), which has been up for a while but I don’t recall pointing out. The Library of Congress and others will be testing RDA before deciding whether to implement it. This will mean putting some of FRBR to the test.
• Chris Todd’s 2 March 2009 presentation to the National Library of New Zealand about FRBR, using the Scottish play as an example.
• UMR – Unified Metadata Resources, a blog post by Lukas Koster. To get the bibliographic universe on the Semantic Web, ” we only need the third essential component: every author his or her or its own URL… One single web page serving as the single identifier of every book, author or subject, available for everyone to link their own holdings, subscriptions, local keywords and circulation data to.” Naturally FRBR is mentioned.
• IFLA’s Statement of International Cataloguing Principles is finally final. “The principles stated here are intended to guide the development of cataloguing codes.” They are firmly grounded in FRBR: see sections 3 (“Entities, Attributes, and Relationships”) and 4 (“Objectives and Functions of the Catalogue”).

• VTLS Announces FRBR Software as a Service, Available Now for All Libraries with any OPAC. “VTLS Inc, a leading global company providing Visionary Technology in Library Solutions, announces an industry first: FRBR Software as a Service. Now, all libraries can present FRBR-enhanced records to their end users without having to FRBRize their entire database, while keeping and using their current ILS. FRBR SaaS builds on a library’s own ILS database and web-based online public catalog by providing a hosted database of matching FRBR records, an online public interface designed to match the source database, and hyperlinks to provide seamless navigation between the two.”
• LibraryThing: New API: What Work? “I’ve added a small, but nifty new API that provides a sure-wife way of connecting any site’s book data to LibraryThing. The ‘What work?’ API takes an ISBN and/or the book title and author and returns the LibraryThing work number, with link URL in XML.” Example: http://www.librarything.com/api/whatwork.php?title=Harry+Potter+and+the+Goblet+of+Fire. “In sum, if you can’t connect your data to LibraryThing now, you aren’t trying!”
• Karen Coyle, Un-uniform Titles. “The Open Library will soon be revealing its first attempt to bring together all of the many published books that represent the same work. It’s been a fascinating exercise; sometimes very satisfying and other times terribly frustrating. If I hadn’t already been convinced that we will need to change our data practices if we want to implement FRBR, this experience would have convinced me.”
• Kelley McGrath, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Summary, and talks about Work records etc. “Do people really judge books by their covers? If not, then why is it that the Penguin version of Passage to India is rated 5 stars while the Penguin Classic version only gets 3?”
• Talet Chaudhri, Assessing FRBR in Dublin Core Application Profiles, Ariadne 58. “The most obvious area of concern is the complexity of the FRBR model. It needs to be made clear whether the model fits the needs of resource delivery on the Web and, if it does, which factors have prevented implementation and how they can be addressed.”
• Open Library bug #338474: Tom Sawyer Detective frbr-ization problem
• Mike Tribby: We will cheerfully implement RDA when LC and a majority of our customers
  adopt it. We will begin planning the changeover when one customer requests
  records done to RDA specifications. One word in my first sentence is a lie.