The FRBR Blog

Pat Riva, chair of of the FRBR Review Group, sent out this announcement on Tuesday:

The FRBR Review Group and the Working Group on FRBR and CIDOC CRM Harmonisation welcomes comments on FRBRoo (object-oriented definition and mapping to FRBRer) version 0.9 (January 2008) available at: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/FRBRoo_V9.1_PR.pdf and also at: http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/frbr_drafts.html.

This document includes a substantive introduction to the purposes and methodology of the work, a graphical overview of the resulting model, complete FRBRoo class and property definitions, a mapping between FRBRer and FRBRoo, all CIDOC CRM class and property definitions referenced, and an appendix on the modelling of identifier creation.

The goal of the FRBRoo project is to express the conceptualisation behind FRBR using the object-oriented methodology as used in the CIDOC CRM. FRBRoo is defined as an extension to the CIDOC CRM, however, the FRBRoo document is self-contained in that all definitions referenced are included. This has provided the opportunity to verify FRBR’s internal consistency, extend the scope of both FRBR and CIDOC CRM, enable interoperability and extend mutual understanding between the museum and library documentation communities by working towards a common ontology.

Comments on this work are appreciated on an ongoing basis, however, comments received prior to April 21, 2008 will be considered at the next meeting of the Working Group in May 2008.

Please send all comments to:

Pat Riva (Chair, FRBR Review Group) patricia.riva@banq.qc.ca

CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Tutorial, from a workshop at the University of Glasgow on 29 January.

In part two, the tutorial presented the draft ooFRBR Model. This model describes in detail the intellectual creation process from the first conception to the publishing in industrial form such as books or electronically. This proved equally interesting for the digital libraries community, and it is a fine example of the extensibility of the CRM for dedicated domains. There was enough time for questions and discussion at the end.

FRBR_OO draft 0.9 (1.1 MB PDF), or, more formally, FRBR: Object-Oriented Definition and Mapping to FRBR_ER (version 0.9 draft), came out last month but I just found out about it.

This document is the draft definition of FRBR (object-oriented version, harmonised with CIDOC CRM), hereafter referred to as FRBR_OO, a formal ontology intended to capture and represent the underlying semantics of bibliographic information and to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information. Such a common view is necessary to provide interoperable information systems for those users interested in accessing common or related content. Beyond that, it results in a formalisation which is more suited for the implementation of FRBR concepts with object-oriented tools, and which facilitates the testing and adoption of FRBR concepts in implementations with different functional specifications and different environments. It applies empirical analysis and ontological structure to the entities and processes associated with works, to their properties, and to the relationships among them. Thereby it reveals a web of interrelationships, which is also applicable to information objects in non-bibliographic arenas2, and is useful to justify the need of information elements in different environments.

(Thanks to Tim Knight for the pointer.)