The FRBR Blog

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.)

Dan Brickley popped into #code4lib t’other day to point this out.

Here’s another Flickr picture tagged with frbr.

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.

I’m at the IFLA 2008 conference in Quebec City, and just got out of the first meeting of the FRBR Review Group. Here are some notes for those of you who couldn’t be here. I’m writing this on my Eee in the lobby of the convention centre, so forgive me for hyperlink skimpiness.

The meeting began at 8:30 AM in a room that was as far away from the entrance to the convention centre as seems humanly possible. Chairs were set up in the room and there was a table for the Review Group members to sit at … but the chairs all faced away from the table. About eighteen observers were present so we all had to turn our chairs around to face the table, which left us staring at the backs of half of the Review Group. Seven of nine of them were present.

Patricia Riva, chair, distributed the agenda, the annual report (which will go online sometime soon, I think), and a report from Gordon Dunsire which was discussed later. She explained some business about terms of service on the Group and renewals and elections etc.

Next she went through the annual report:

• Various new translations of the FRBR Final Report have been done: Chinese, German, etc.
• Some objectives from the strategic plan were met, for example the amendments to the definition of the Expression entity were made.
• They will be thinking about further changes to FRBR that might be necessary given work on FRAD, FRSAR, FRBRoo, etc., and working with those groups, the ISBD people, etc.
• Work on FRBRoo is continuing. Draft 0.9 came out earlier this year and comments will be reviewed at another meeting. Work on the RDF namespace is continuing. More on both of these below.
• They will support implementations: “Moral support,” said Pat Riva, “we don’t have a budget.”
• Patrick LeBoeuf would like someone to take over the FRBR Bibliography. Some discussion of that.
• Some discussion of the mailing list

Ed O’Neill of OCLC is chair of the Working Group on Aggregates. They are meeting Thursday so nothing is final yet, but he talked about what they’d done and what they generally agreed on. An aggregate is “a bibliographic unit comprised of multiple works,” they all say. The Expression amendment meant changes to thinking about aggregates, because it shifted some things (like a work with a new introduction) from being a new expression of a work to being two aggregate works. Is a bibliographic unit an aggregate or a work in itself? He said the amendment about doubled the number the number of aggregates out there. It puts the emphasis on the intellectual side, not the physical manifestation, and they’re thinking along the same lines. “Is a journal an aggregate of articles, or is it a work in its own right comprised of parts?” Thursday they will review some guidelines that will help people decide on such matters.

O’Neill said the FRBR Report is vague on exactly what a Work is, which makes it hard to discuss aggregates. Lots of nodding at that. He said there were three approaches to thinking about modelling:

• work of works model: there’s a hierarchy of works, for example a journal is a work made up of other works
• manifestation of works model: an aggregate is not a work in itself, it is a manifestation of works
• work of parts model: the simplest but least attractive intellectually; a collection of novels by a writer is a work, and the novels are just parts of it.

The three models are incompatible, but they all have advocates. In a report (not available online, I don’t think) they tried modelling different aggregates with each of the three models to see how they looked.

More will be known after the Thursday meeting. They are determined to be done before the IFLA meeting in Milan next year.

Next was an update on the FRBR/CRM FRBRoo collaboration. The draft received some comments, and they will give close scrutiny to any major problems at the next meeting in a couple of days, and then wrap everything up by e-mail. People are starting to use FRBRoo and want a stable finished version, so they’re going to push along to wrap it up.

The last major thing in the meeting was about representing FRBR in RDF and setting up a proper schema and namespace. Gordon Dunsire had done a project to get this going and you can see his work in the NSDL metadata registry sandbox:

• FRBR Entitles
• FBRR Relationships
• FRBR Relationships as concepts
• FRBR User Tasks

These will be moved out of the sandbox and into the proper registry soon and become provisional.

There was discussion of the Scholarly Works Application Profile and Ian Davis and Richard Newman’s RDF schema, both of which changed and added some things.

There was a lengthy discussion about what to do next, mostly involving administrative and organizational questions that you’d expect at any international organization. I’ll skip them. The upshot of it all is that the Review Group will recommend that IFLA get things in place so that an IFLA namespace exists where this FRBR schema (and expected schemas for FRAD and FRSAR, and who know what else around IFLA) can be housed. “Everything is moving in the direction of the Semantic Web,” Dunsire said, and IFLA should be ready.

So after review and approval and the finding of a proper home, there will be an official RDF schema representing FRBR, authoritative and accurate, properly maintained, under version control, etc.

After all that time was running out. Priorities for future work are the RDF schema and the namespace, and FRBRoo. “Attributes in general are an issue,” Riva said, and perhaps there will be a working group on them. The meeting was adjourned a little after 10:30.

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.)