The FRBR Blog

• LCCN Support and Other Improvements in xID Service, an update from OCLC’s Xiaoming Liu.
• David Weinberger had dinner with Sam Oh in April and talked about FRBR.
• Sam Oh‘s slides from his ATOMS 2007 talk Topic Maps-Driven Semantic Services for National Library of Korea (3.6 MB PDF).

Back in August I posted notes on what I saw at the IFLA 2008 conference in Quebec City. The official minutes of all of the Cataloguing Section meetings (244 KB PDF) are now online. It tells you what happened at all of the meetings (including the FRBR, FRSAR and FRAD meetings), who was there, and how they’re getting along doing what’s set out in their strategic plan.

Diane Hillmann’s slides from her talk Facing Forward: The Challenges Facing Cataloging and Catalogers (2.4 MB PPT) are good reading. She covers what’s going on with RDA and how all this stuff (including FRBR) will work for the Semantic Web. Lots of examples and illustrations help to make it clear. It’ll be quite a change when cataloguers don’t enter a name, they enter a URI.

Claire Dupont of the Université catholique de Louvain pointed this out to me — she gave what looks like an interesting talk there — Workshop on FRBR in The European Library, which took place in Lison on 9 October. The slides for all of the presentations, Dupont’s and others, are available so go over and have a look through them.

I didn’t get to the pre-IFLA conference about Resource Description and Access, but now I can see what I missed: the presentations are up on the Joint Steering Committee web site.

Gordon Dunsire’s RDA Vocabularies and Concepts (114 KB PDF) will be of particular interest to people interested in RDF, the Semantic Web, SKOS, etc. Have a look.

My colleague Tim Knight posted his impressions of the event on the York University cataloguers’ blog after he got back.

Tuesday morning last week I went by the VTLS booth in the exhibit hall at the IFLA 2008 conference. What a friendly bunch of people they are! They did a demonstration of their new FRBRization service, which I posted about a couple of weeks ago. It’s very interesting and I was impressed. I took a few pictures and I’ll go through what they showed and tell you what I remember of it.

You run a library. You have your catalogue on the web. (If you use VTLS’s catalogue front-end, Virtua, you can do all the following stuff yourself. If you run some other system, you’ll link out to VTLS’s web site to make things work.) Let’s say you search for adventures of tom sawyer. You get the usual list of results; in this case, three books were found.

Notice the “FRBR Display: See related information (FRBR)” link. Forget about the wording, the important thing is what you see when you follow the link

This shows a work-expression-manifestation display. The adventures of Tom Sawyer - Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 (highlighted) says what the work is. (There shouldn’t be a plus sign beside it, because there’s nothing to expand, and the things below it should be indented, but that’s a minor presentation thing so overlook that.)

There are two expressions: non-musical recording - English and Books - English. The first expression has one item each of two manifestations, one on CD and one on cassette. The second expression is the written text of the work, and there are five items of print manifestations. Books. The catalogue found three different copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, representing three manifestations, but this FRBRizing tool found two more that have different titles.

All of this was automatially done by VTLS’s FRBRizing algorithm, they said. They can take a set of MARC records and run through them looking at the 008 field, titles, uniform titles, main entry, author entries, everything, the more the better, and pull out the works, expressions, and manifestations. From what they said this Tom Sawyer example came from real data from real catalogues.

Clicking on one of the manifestation titles changes what’s displayed on the right-hand side of the screen, as I recall. The full MARC view is turned on above, but it could show the information in the usual online catalogue format, and link back to the original library’s catalogue to the user can place a hold etc.

You can see how it would be possible to put a “Get any copy” button at the expression level. If someone wants to read Tom Sawyer and they want to read it as soon as possible, then the system can find the first available item of that expression and give it to them. There’s no need why the user should have to check all five manifestations to see where an item is free.

VTLS makes MARC records for the work, expression, and manifesation. Here’s a view of the hierarchy breakdown for Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6. You can see the name of the work at the top, and then lots of expressions, each identified by the orchestra and conductor. (Performance date could go hear too.) One of the expression views is expanded and you can see three manifestations are listed: the LP, the cassette, and the CD.

FRBR really does work well for music, as this shows. In the box in the bottom half of the screen is the MARC record for the work itself, Symphony No. 6. There’s a 240 Uniform Title field, but not the 245 Title Statement, because that belongs to the manifestation. They’ve put in a local field, a 990, saying “Work,” and the 999s are other local fields, I assume holding information about the FRBRized view.

This is a new service they’re offering. I asked if it would be possible to get them to FRBRize my catalogue and then have my system use web services on their servers to get the FRBR information when I need it, and they said sure, that’d be possible if people wanted it. With that a library wouldn’t have to send users from their own catalogue to VTLS’s web site, it could grab the information as it needed it (in XML, JSON, whatever) and display it locally to the user.

It occurs to me as I write that if libraries had this interface made and then opened up their data to everyone, so we could all see what manifestations went with what expressions and works, we’d all be better off. We’ll see. Until then, keep an eye out for people starting to use VTLS’s service. It looks like the best vendor implementation out there. I thank them for showing it to me, and congratulate them on their hard work.

Thursday, the last day of programming at IFLA 2008, was when the Working Group on Aggregates met. Ed O’Neill of OCLC is the chair, and there were six others at the table, including Barbara Tillett and Judy Kuhagen of the Library of Congress. The three of them were the most active in the discussion, though I think Maja Žumer would have spoken up too had she been there. About a dozen people watched, most of whom I recognized from earlier FR* meetings.

There were three handouts for group members, and, generously, we observers all got a copy. The discussion centred around two things on the agenda, so I’ll just summarize what was said. No decision was reached, so there’s no official answer on how FRBR will handle aggregates yet.

Here are the “data model principles” that had been set out in some earlier discussions to help test the three ways of modelling aggregates;

• Inheritance: Properties (attributes and relationships) are inherited by subordinate entities (children) from superior entities. The properties of a work are inherited by its expressions; the properties of an expression are inherited by its manifestations; and the properties of a manifestation are inherited by its items.
• Universality: If an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it must be a work in all of its manifestations. [O'Neill explained: the criteria for deciding if something is a work shouldn't depend on its manifestation.]
• Distinctness: A non-aggregate work is the smallest distinct and autonomous entity.

After that they got on to the three models they had been considering:

• Work-of-Parts Model: The aggregate as a whole is a work; individual components are simply parts of the work. [Tillett pointed out that "component" already means "component work" in FRBR and they didn't want to confuse the terminology.]
• Manifestation-of-Works Model: The manifestation is an aggregate of works and may include an “aggregating” work.
• Work-of-Works Model: Aggregates are works that are comprised of other works.

No-one had any other models to consider, and nobody there thought the first one was valid, so it came down to Manifestation-of-Works (with O’Neill as main advocate) vs. Work-of-Works (with Tillett as main advocate).

A few points from the discussion:

• Tillett said inheritance holds down through Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, but there’s no inheritance between Works in the Work-of-Works model. There is a Work-to-Work relation (whole-part, sequential, etc.) between them, with no inheritance happening.
• There’s a difference between an aggregate that’s an augmentation, for example adding an introduction to a novel, and one that’s a collection, for example putting the three novels of a trilogy together into one book. Kuhagen made the distinction between pre-formed and post-formed collections, where the difference is when the decision to make the collection was made.
• But none of that matters for this discussion, Tillett said, and she said something she repeated a few times through the meeting: FRBR is meant to work at a high conceptual level, and not get into applications. (Applications as in “the model applied to this situation,” not application as in “computer software.”) FRBR should only think about aggregates in general, any kind of aggregate, and not worry what type an aggregate is. That level of detail belongs in applications of the model, where people can make their own local rules and interpretations.
• O’Neill said there would probably eventually be a subclassing of aggregates, because they are not all the same. This could be done in a FRBRoo way.
• What if in different applications of FRBR there are different rules about what a work is? O’Neill asked. How can we share information if we don’t agree on what a work is? “We can link it,” Tillett said. She agreed that something could be a work in one application but not in another, though theoretically it really is a work.
• O’Neill said that many things are works don’t need to be recognized as such, for example a very short introduction to a book. But that’s a local implementation decision, and if the introduction were to be recognized, it would have to be recognized as a work of its own. Everyone agreed on that. The universality rule was reworded to use “can be” instead of must: “If an entity is a work in any of its manifestations, it can be a work in all of its manifestations.”
• There was some discussion about the distinctness principle and whether it begged the question of an aggregate being a work of works. They all went to a draft report and looked at something and clarified that a list was ORed, not ANDed.
• In the end only the distinctness criteria was seen as useful: inheritance doesn’t apply to Work-of-Works and universality as modified is a given so it’s not useful as a test.
• They got into a metaphor next to think about an “aggregating work.” Take Patrick Le Boeuf’s special FRBR issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, which contained articles by many people. It was also released as a book. O’Neill said each chapter is an independent work, but Le Boeuf’s role as an editor is that of an aggregator. Each article is like a brick, and Le Boeuf’s intellectual contribution was to make the mortar that holds all of the bricks together into a new work. That mortar is an “aggregating work.” The aggregate work is the whole wall of bricks and mortar.
• Tillett said there was no need for this. The articles and the books are all just works, and they are related to each other. That’s all.
• Gordon Dunsire spoke up from the audience with an objection to this “aggregating work” idea, I think saying that if you take three bricks and put them together with mortar and call that new thing a brick, then you have bricks containing bricks, and it gets recursive and you get into problems. You can’t have a brick containing other bricks. (This reminded me of Russell’s paradox.)

Eventually they decided on a bake-off. They would take some examples and represent them using both the Manifestation-of-Works model (O’Neill and Žumer) and the Work-of-Works model (Tillett and Kuhagen). They would look at those and decide what to recommend as the amendment to FRBR. The examples will be: a collection of music by Sibelius (based on an example Eeva Murtomaa brought), an augmented version of Humphry Clinker (with an introduction, illustrations, that kind of thing), Le Boeuf’s FBBR journal issue/book, and a moving image to be decided (I’d guess a DVD with extras). In order to have this all done by next year’s conference in Milan they need to have the recommendation done for February, so they’re going to get the modelling done before October.

This working group meeting was really lively and fun to watch. I’m glad I went.

Late in the afternoon two days ago, Wednesday 13 August, was the second meeting of the FRBR Review Group here at IFLA 2008. I had to work on some unexpected stuff with a York colleague so I missed the first half hour of the meeting. When I arrived, back in the same room as the first meeting and the FRSAR meeting had been and the WG on Aggregates meeting would be, there were six people at the table (Patricia Riva chair) and fifteen observers.

They were talking about FRBRoo, “F – R – B – R – O – O” as most of them called it, but “furburroo” as I call it. A few scattered points I jotted down :

• Something (I missed what) in FRBRoo means that until at least one expression exists, the work does not exist. That clarifies an existing philosophical problem.
• Riva noted that really all manifestations are aggregates: the dust jacket design, the author photograph, etc., are all additions to the core. (The relative importance of those additions is another matter, as the Working Group on Aggregates discussed the next day.)
• In the FRBRoo mappings, Corporate Body in FRBR is matched up with Group in CRM. They are different, though, and some things are groups that aren’t considered corporate bodies in the library world. Something may get subclassed.
• There was more discussion about FRBRoo, remaining work to be done, what will happen next, etc. and general agreement that it, and object orientation, are not simple to understand.
• They will look into the possibility of working with the archives community.
• Riva pointed out something that Robert Maxwell noted in his book. The definition of the Person entity (3.2.5 in FRBR) says, “For the purposes of this study persons are treated as entities only to the extent that they are involved in the creation or realization of a work (e.g., as authors, composers, artists, editors, translators, directors, performers, etc.), or are the subject of a work (e.g., as the subject of a biographical or autobiographical work, of a history, etc.).” According to that there’s no place for a Person as producer of a Manifestation or owner of an Item. Corporate Body has the same note. There seemed to be general agreement that this was wrong.
• Maja Žumer pointed out that FRBR, FRAD, and FRSAR don’t or won’t all perfectly match up. People who implement them will find problems. How to keep up with all of that? Things are in flux, but people are getting on and building FRBR implementations even though there are known problems and some work still being done. Some discussion about that. There are organizational issues within IFLA about who reports to who and ho the different groups are organized and which reports to what.

More to come about the Working Group on Aggregates meeting the next day.

Yesterday morning at 8:30 I went to a Web 2.0 discussion group meeting. I missed Karen Coyle (she spoke by webcast or recording, and wasn’t there), and then heard Karen Calhoun (OCLC) talk. Next she, Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix), and Patrick Peiffer (there to speak for Creative Commons) had a panel discussion and took questions from the audience. The panelists were all interesting but as usual some of the same old topics (are libraries still relevant? what is it with tags, anyway?) came up.

After that I went to the meeting of the Working Group on FRANAR, which (there were some name changes) is finishing up work on FRAD: Functional Requirements for Authority Data. They are very close to putting out the final version and wrapping up work.

There were thirteen people at the meeting. Glenn Patton (OCLC) is chair, and he and five others sat at one corner of a large square of tables in a large and otherwise empty room. Two people sat in another corner, I sat alone at the third, and four others clustered at the last. Patton started the meeting, summarized some past activity, and said the goal was for the group to wrap things up soon.

There were a few things to cover based on comments on the last draft:

• They’re going to add a relationship between Family and Corporate Body.
• There was a lengthy discussion about Person-to-Name (or Family- and Corporate Body-to-Name relations) and Name-to-Name relations. The way FRAD works, Person is an entity and Name is an entity. They are related. A Person can have a pseudonym. That is another kind of Name and the relation might be hasPseudonym/isPseudonymOf. But what if a Person has a Name in an early form and another Name in a later form? Are the Names directly related (they are both entities, so they can be) or are they only indirectly related, through the Person? They discussed this kind of thing for almost an hour and a half. Section 5.4 will be changed and some relations pulled out into a new Name-to-Name relationship section.
• Some stuff from the FRSAR meeting was gone over. RDF modelling and reversible relationship names are important. “isKnownBy” is hard to reverse but something like “isAppellationOf” and “hasAppellation” might work. There’s a difference between Major as a title and the role of being a major. And Major as a title is different from Jr. or Sr.

Patton wrapped things up, summarized what remained to be done, and said they’d have the final version ready to present to higher up in the fall. They want to get the final vote on approval done quickly, so FRAD should be all done in a few months, as I understood what was said and how IFLA works.

The sustained mental energy and focus of the people on the Working Group (and two of the observers, who were quite involved) was astounding. They worked for over three hours without stopping and always kept up good spirits. They spent some time on nitpicking details like any group editing a final draft has to, and other time on deep philosophical issues that will underpin cataloguing and authority rules for a long time to come. In my notes I wrote, “These people are incredibly focused. Their attention never flags. This must be what the negotiations about the Treaty of Ghent were like, but with fewer frock coats.”

Another interesting meeting. Keep your eye out for the final FRAD report.

Just because I didn’t post yesterday doesn’t mean there wasn’t FRBRosity happening at IFLA 2008. I just got busy with stuff, and then there was a huge party where everyone swarmed the tables and ate all the food, then half of the people were driven away by loud disco music and the other half got down with their bad selves on the dance floor.

• I went by the VTLS booth and saw a demo of their FRBRization service I mentioned a little while ago. I was quite impressed. It’s far beyond what any other vendor is doing. I took some pictures but can’t get them uploaded from where I am so my report will have to wait.
• In the American Library Association booth there’s a screencast running that shows how the online Resource Description and Access (RDA) system will look, and some of how it will work. I was told it will get posted on the web soon. There’s no example in the demo of how to actually catalogue an item, I assume because that bit isn’t working yet, especially since RDA isn’t finished, but if it goes well it looks like it could be a good system for managing and customizing a pretty complicated business. The ways workflows can be handled will be worth watching.
• Athena Salaba and Yin Zhang have a poster up about their research project, summarizing the results from their Delphi analysis.