Re: bibliographic issues

From: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 10:03:34 -0400

Hi Eric,

I'll pass your FRBR-related pointers on.

On Aug 2, 2005, at 9:24 AM, Eric Miller wrote:

>> Leigh, Richard and I have also talked about a more grounded
>> representation that fills a role more like MODS, and so is
>> significantly richer than bibtex-in-RDF (which always was a mistake).
>> My knowledge of RDF is thin, but I've been experimenting with an
>> XSLT that transforms MODS XML into nicely normalized RDF that's
>> currently looking like this:
>
> Points for grounding your terms in URI space, but I get 404 for
> http://purl.org/NET/xbiblio/rbo . As such, I'm not exactly sure how
> the instance data you outline here maps back to the FRBR model you
> mentioned above.

Right, right; I'm currently just working on the XSLT and figuring out
basic structure. I've not gotten to that (important) bit.

>> <published>
>> <date>
>> <year>1990</year>
>> </date>
>> </published>
>
> I don't think the above means what you think it means :)
>
> dcterms:issued may be closer.

So is it then appropriate to do:

<dct:issued>
   <date>
     <year>2000</year>
   </date>
</dct:issued>

... ?

I'm thinking about representing dates like "October 1, ,3, 6-10, 2001"
or "Summer 2000" or "April/May 1999", so I think reification is
important.

>> <foaf:Person rdf:about="people#gettys-j">
>> <foaf:givenname>Jim</foaf:givenname>
>> <foaf:family_name>Gettys</foaf:family_name>
>> </foaf:Person>
>
> Representing people's names is easy to do, but not easy to do well.

Indeed, dates and names are the two hardest bits to represent in my
mind. I chatted with Morten about his FOAF names proposal way back,
but it seems it's still stuck as just a proposal.

> Getting various content providers to agree on *a few* properties when
> it comes to describing peoples for bibliographic description, however,
> is a small but useful step. For the content providers that are reading
> this list, I'm wondering if the following might be a simple core folks
> could agree on...
>
> <foaf:Person>
> <rdf:value>Jim Gettys</rdf:value> <!-- default value for apps that
> don't know foaf -->

Why wouldn't you use foaf:name?

> <foaf:givenname>Jim</foaf:givenname>
> <foaf:surname>Gettys</foaf:surname>
> </foaf:Person>
>
> Alf, Matthew? others? What do you think?

I think that's a reasonable short-term solution, but what about if you
need to represent a name in Mandarin (with a family/given sort order)
and also its Latin transliteration? I could be wrong, but doesn't
"surname" still presume Western sort order?

This is the sort of thing I was talking to Morten about ;-)

Bruce
Received on Tue Aug 02 2005 - 14:00:13 EDT

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