recapitulation of Tom Baker's FRBR use case

Intro

The library community's FRBR expresses named graph requirements. FRBR is the foundation for RDA (Resource Description and Access), the new cataloging standard towards which major libraries are moving.

This proposal for conceptualizing FRBR entities as Named Graphs is based on work by Ronald Murray and Barbara Tillett of the Library of Congress. These ideas are illustrated in a visually very engaging slide deck, "From Moby-Dick to Mash-Ups: Thinking About Bibliographic Networks" Gordon Dunsire has also contributed to the proposal.

Time pressures

We would be especially grateful for feedback in advance of an event on 27 April at the British Library. The event will mark the fifth anniversary of a meeting in May 2007 which resulted in a recommendation that RDA and FRBR be expressed in RDF.

Resources

• Wikipedia FRBR page

Expressing FRBR Descriptions using Named Graphs: a proposal

W3C's [Resource Description Framework (RDF) Working Group] is currently discussing proposals for supporting "named graphs" to meet a [wide range of use cases], possibly by extending the TriG Named Graph and RDF Data Language ([trig], [@@]). This proposal outlines how Named Graphs might be used in resource descriptions that are based on the so-called WEMI entities (Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item) of the IFLA model Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records ([FRBR]).

This proposal views descriptions of WEMI entities as bundles of statements made at different levels of abstraction, from the most concrete Item level to the most abstract Work level. Multi-level WEMI descriptions specify the characteristics that any given Item shares with other Items at the level of Work, Expression, and Manifestation. Ideally, it would be possible to incorporate descriptions of resources at the Work, Expression, and Manifestation levels, maintained in a distributed manner by various institutions, into the local descriptions of particular Items.

Consider the following four Named Graphs, each of which is identified with a URI (A, B, C, or D) and contains two statements:

-- Named Graph D, a Work-level description

   P has_title         "Moby-Dick, or, the Whale"
   P has_as_subject    "Whaling Ships -- Fiction"

-- Named Graph C, an Expression-level description

   Q has_language      "English"                
   Q has_extent        "213711 words"           

-- Named Graph B, a Manifestation-level description

   R has_edition_issue "First Edition"         
   R has_pub_place     "New York NY"

-- Named Graph A, an Item-level description

   X has_OAI_ID        http://hdl.handle.net/10150/16470
   X has_condition     "yellowing at page edges"

One might bind these four chunks into a single description by "including" them into a common "frame":

   FrameL includes   NamedGraphA
   FrameL includes   NamedGraphB
   FrameL includes   NamedGraphC
   FrameL includes   NamedGraphD

One would then want to infer that the Item in hand (described by the statements in Named Graph A) is _also_ described by statements in the Named Graphs at the more abstract levels of Work, Expression, and Manifestation included in the same Frame. In other words, if X is the URI of the Item in hand, one would like to infer:

   X has_title         "Moby-Dick, or, the Whale"
   X has_as_subject    "Whaling Ships -- Fiction"
   X has_language      "English"                
   X has_extent        "213711 words"           
   X has_edition_issue "First Edition"          
   X has_pub_place     "New York NY             
   X has_OAI_ID        http://hdl.handle.net/10150/16470
   X has_condition     "yellowing at page edges"

Discussion

1. Formal notions of Frame, and of "inclusion" in a Frame, would need to be defined for the general case.
2. Formal rules would be needed for interpreting Frames with different sets of FRBR descriptions, e.g., for the simple case above, in which statements from Work-, Expression-, and Manifestation-level descriptions are interpreted as applying to the Item.
3. Given the complex, even chaotic nature of the Web, flexibility to implement this approach in a partial manner is a critical design criterion. Particular WEMI descriptions should be useful in a Linked Data environment independently of particular Frames and, ideally, even in the absence of an understanding of Frames and Inclusion (see 1 above) or of the particular rules applicable to FRBR (see 2 above). In the example described above, the statements in Named Graph D about Work P would be useful independently of FrameL, which (according to rules yet to be defined) would merely apply those statements, additionally, to Item X.