The FRBR Blog

Karen Coyle sent Progress Report: RDA Vocabularies Project to the rda-l mailing list. “Note that the FRBR entities have been entered into the NSDL metadata registry sandbox [4] along with the FRBR relationships [5] and the FRBR user tasks [6].”

But then Diane Hillmann followed up to say, “The NSDL Registry now has the new version of its schema registration capability available, including the provisional registration of the RDA element vocabulary. Go to http://metadataregistry.org, and click on ’schemas’ in the right hand side browse list. Or go directly to: http://metadataregistry.org/schema/show/id/1.html and click on the ‘Properties’ tab to see he currently registered properties.”

Last week Talisman Rob Styles posted MARC, RDF and FRBR, two initialisms and an acronym that probably get your heart racing like they do mine. In it, he points to a paper he wrote with fellow Talismen Danny Ayers and Nadeem Shabir: Semantic MARC, MARC 21 and the Semantic Web (440 KB PDF),

Abstract: The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Thom Hickey, of OCLC renown, left a comment.

Here’s a short paper I just came across: National Libraries and the Semantic Web: Requirements and Applications, by Lars G. Svensson. (You may get a warning about an SSL certificate, but don’t fret.) It was given in February at the 2007 International Conference on Semantic Web and Digital Libraries in India.

A nice paragraph:

It has been pointed out, that permalinks from a single library only offers the possibility to comment on or tag a catalogue record from that library (Danowski, 2006). If, however, the library records relate to the national library’s authority record, comments and tags can be shared among instances of a particular publication. If the FRBR model is used, it will even be possible to differentiate the annotations between the physical items (“pp 50-55 are missing”), the manifestation (“a typographical error on p 238”), the expression (“the translator has totally misinterpreted the meaning of ‘synd om’”) or even complete works (“James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is hard to read”).

The Danowski cite is to Warum del.icio.us für Bibliothekskataloge untauglich ist. Google can translate that into English but it does a bad job of it.

First, John Cowan’s Extreme Markup 2007: Thursday, a blog post from 13 August about the Extreme Markup Languages 2007 conference in Montreal.

On Wednesday I talked about the nocturne on naming, but it was actually held on Thursday. Much of it was spent discussing the FRBR model of works, expressions, manifestations, and items. For computer-document purposes, a work is the abstract work, e.g. Hamlet; an expression is a particular kind realization, like a particular edition of the text or recording of a performance; a manifestation is the expression in a particular format such as .txt, .html, .doc, or .avi; and an item is a particular copy residing on a particular server, disk, or tape. Ideally, there should be separate URIs for each of these things.

From there to FRBR, A.L.I.C.E., Organs and Other Extremities, a blog post by Danny Ayers on 15 August. He’d read Cowan’s post, quotes the bit above, and says:

Another paper he mentions talks about describing a pipe organ using topic maps. I need to read this properly sometime soon, there’s an obvious overlap with what I want to do for describing the Tinocaster in RDF (grr, I forgot, that server’s not got its data back yet - link to be fixed soon). As it happens, looking at that took me (with the aid of various Talisians) down the path of using FRBR - how to do a music store, and more generally looking at describing (manufactured) products, prompting the coinage FRPR.

You read that right: FRPR is Functional Requirements for Product Records. Check out the example. Interesting.

Frédérick Giasson’s Modifications and Things to Consider is a sample of the e-mail going around the Bibliographic Ontology Specification Group. That’s where they talk about the Bibliographic Ontology Specification, which sometimes uses FRBR concepts in its arrangements.

From 30 May, Métadonnées: Faut-il Parier sur RDF (Resource Description Framework)? It’s an interview with Yann Nicolas discussing RDF, FRBR, other standards, and metadata in general.

As you might guess from the title, it’s in French. My French isn’t good enough to read it all, but perhaps yours is. (I didn’t know that données means “data.” Donner is “to give” but I don’t know the etymology. Si vous le connaissent, ajoutez un commentaire.)

Here’s the interview run through Google’s translate tool and turned into bad English. (Yesterday I pointed you to a Norwegian’s Ph.D. thesis which he wrote in English, so I think you can put up with a bad translation of a short French interview today.)

Here are some more links to discussion about the Dublin Core/Resource Description and Access meeting in London last week.

Andy Powell was there and posted about it in When Worlds Collide …, so go read that.

Jenn Riley knows a lot about metadata, and she has some reservations about the new project. In DC and RDA - The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? she says:

There’s nothing in the announcement that indicates the development of RDA proper will be affected by this work; in fact, the indication in the announcement that funding will be sought for the activities outlined implies the work is a long way off, likely entirely too late to have any real effect on RDA. This seems to be to be entirely backwards – trying to harmonize DC principles with RDA after the fact. Didn’t the DC community learn its lesson about the pitfalls of this approach when developing the Abstract Model, only realizing long after developing a metadata element set that it would benefit from an underlying model.

This general approach failed miserably with the DC Libraries Application Profile. There, the application profile developers wanted to use some elements from MODS, but weren’t able to because MODS doesn’t conform to the DCMI Abstract Model. So basically what the DC community said here was that application profiles are great, they form the fundamental basis of DC extensibility, but, oh yeah, you can’t actually use elements from any other standards unless they conform to the Abstract Model, even though are no approved encodings for even DC itself more than two years after the Abstract Model was released. OK then. Way to foster collaboration between metadata communities.

Jonathan Rochkind says in RDA, JSC, DCAM, RDF, FRBR that he doesn’t grok the Dublin Core Abstract Model. He points to Towards an Interoperability Framework for Metadata Standards (1 MB PDF) by Mikael Nilsson, Pete Johnston, Ambjörn Naeve, and Andy Powell, and says it’s been helpful in helping him get a better idea of what it means. Follow the links in his blog post for other interesting stuff.

Lorcan Dempsey’s Data Convergence says the new plan is “interesting food for thought.”

Exciting news came out yesterday about a Monday-Tuesday meeting at the British Library with bigwigs from RDA and Dublin Core. (Remember, RDA is Resource Description and Access, an in-progress revision to cataloguing rules, and the Dublin Core Metadata Intitiative (DCMI) is behind a widespread and fairly simple metadata schema, Dublin Core. RDA and DC are sometimes contrasted because the former is (or will be) a huge book full of complicated rules and DC can be used extremely casually.)

Recommendations:

The meeting participants agreed that RDA and DCMI should work together to build on the existing work of both communities.

The participants recommend that the RDA Committee of Principals and DCMI seek funding for work to develop an RDA Application Profile — specifically that the following activities be undertaken:

• development of an RDA Element Vocabulary
• development of an RDA DC Application Profile based on FRBR and FRAD
• disclosure of RDA Value Vocabularies using RDF/RDFS/SKOS

Outcomes:

The benefits of this activity will be that:

• the library community gets a metadata standard that is compatible with the Web Architecture and that is fully interoperable with other Semantic Web initiatives
• the DCMI community gets a libraries application profile firmly based on the DCAM and FRBR (which will be a high profile exemplar for others to follow)
• the Semantic Web community get a significant pool of well thought-out metadata terms to re-use
• there is wider uptake of RDA

UPDATE: Don’t miss this wiki set up for the meeting, with lists and notes and links and useful background information. Thanks to Christine Schwartz for pointing it out; I missed it in all the excitement.

Karen Coyle’s Astonishing Announcement: RDA Goes 2.0 says “The call for a modernization of the library approach to metadata has been heard…. This is nothing short of revolutionary.” She does a mini-interview with Dublin Core honcho Diane Hillman, who says about the proposed vocabulary: “It will look something like the Dublin Core registered terms…. Having the formal vocabulary means that there can be a testbed for the many and complex relationships that are being expressed in RDA, FRBR and FRAD.”

Alistair Miles was one of the people at the meeting, and in RDA: Resource Description and Access he says, “The main outcome of the meeting was a proposal to jointly develop a new Dublin Core Application Profile for libraries, based on the RDA and on FRBR. The profile would also be closely linked to the ePrints application profile developed in the UK for Intute. The ePrints AP is an example of how the Dublin Core community is moving beyond the “15 elements” towards providing a general framework to support rich and highly structured metadata, via the Dublin Core Abstract Model [latest draft].”

(Heery and Patel define an application profile as “schemas which consist of data elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together by implementors, and optimised for a particular local application.” There are lots of different kinds of metadata systems out there, and chances are if you’re doing some work and need some metadata, you need a few terms from this one, a few from that one, and one from over there. Or perhaps one existing system has everything you need, but in fact it has too much, so you pick out of it just what you need. You write up your own set of rules about how you’re going to use the elements you picked for your particular circumstances, and that’s an application profile.)

Finally, in RDA/FRBR and the Semantic Web, Ed Summers points out that this is what Ian Davis, Richard Newman, and Bruce D’Arcus began in 2005: Expression of Core FRBR Concepts in RDF. Last June Ian Davis posted Harry Potter in FRBR where he showed what a FRBRization of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire can look in RDF. When the new work is done, we can FRBRize the same book again and see what’s different in the new rules.

The RDA + DC announcement is very interesting. Among other things, the work will bring some very useful standardization and formalization to all this stuff. We’ll have a standard set of terms that everyone can use, whether they’re reading Resource Description and Access and cataloguing a book at the National Library of Canada or whanging some metadata into a blog’s RSS feed in New Delhi. Also, we’ll have an application profile and defined rules about how to use it and express it in formats like RDF. Everyone everywhere can use the same words, with agreed-upon meanings, when they want to use RDA and FRBR and FRAD to describe things. I bet a lot of people will use it.

Danny Ayers sent some mail to the semantic web mailing list yesterday: How to Describe Composite Products?

I’ve recently been doing a little electric guitar modding, and I’m wondering how best to describe the (material) results in RDF. It’s quite rich information conceptually, you need to talk about relationships involving instruments and their parts in general as well as individual instruments and their individual parts. Because of these different facets, I believe rather more than direct use of RDFS’s class hierarchies is needed, SKOS maybe augmented with a bit of OWL seems a likely candidate.

A fairly generic application of what I’m after would be to describe a (composite) product in a company catalogue, while also allowing their repair department to talk about a particular customer’s broken product and its parts.

Does anyone know of any work in this area?

The only vocabulary shaped like this of which I’m aware is that of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) [1], which makes distinctions between Works, Manifestations, Items and Expressions. But I’m really not sure how reusable this is in the domain I have in mind as the target objects in FRBR are a little more abstract (artistic works rather than engineered planks).

“Engineered planks” do represent a bit of a challenge for FRBR.

(Thanks to Ed Summers for the pointer.)

Chris Oliver (a librarian at McGill University, ergo a colleague of Pat Riva, chair of the FRBR Review Group) has a paper called RDA and Ejournals in Journal of Electronic Resource Description & Access (vol 8).

Abstract RDA: Resource Description and Access is the new content standard that moves beyond the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules through its alignment with the conceptual frameworks expressed in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Records (FRAR). It addresses two major problems in bibliographic description: seriality and content versus carrier, and makes the description of ejournals a straightforward process.

I haven’t read it, but it looks like you just need to register to read the articles in this online journal. Why, I don’t know, but there you have it.