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Hi Joe, You wrote: > On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, Jakob Voss wrote: >> Someone just has to define was 'holding' is and what information it must >> carry, so we can define a simple holding interchange format that is not >> as fuzzy and overblown as most of the library most other library >> standards. As a sideline we implement another part of FRBR (a mapping >> from frbr:manifestation to frbr:item) > > I've been fighting with the issue of what do you return in response to a > query (in the context of federated search systems ... but for scientific > data, not bibliographic) for almost 4 years now. > > Although I think FRBR helps to frame the problem, the real issue is that > there are many reasons why someone might ask the question, and without > knowing what they're trying to solve, we don't know what sort of a record > we should be returning. A holding webservice is not meant to be asked by human beeing with fuzzy information needs in mind. Instead it is just one service to tell you where an already identifier manifestation can be found. If you still don't know which exact manifestation (for instance you don't mind which edition of a book), then the holding service needs to be queried for each possible manifestation. > (and, to make things more complex, I think there's a group 1 entity that's > missing in FRBR -- the concept of 'text' in the scope of the specific > words that are used but without the formatting, so I can de-duplicate at > the translation level, rather than only once pagination and other > typesetting have been applied, at the Expression level. The best > correlation I can come up with to the problem in terms of bibliographic > records is the question 'Do you have a copy of the King James Bible?') I don't see the problem here. The King James Bible is a frbr:expression of the frbr:work Bible or a frbr:work of its own (I never really catched the difference between frbr:work and frbr:expression). If you ask for the text of the King James Bible then you ask for a frbr:item of that work/expression with specific additional characteristics of containing no formatting but only the text. At http://ebible.org/bible/kjv/ you can download the King James Bible in different formats - each file is a frbr:item of its own. I think the problem of applying FRBR lies in the lack of authority files. There is no easy way to link http://ebible.org/bible/kjv/kjvtxt.zip (Plain text version) with the general concept of "The King James Bible" because there is no registry of frbr:work/expressions. In some cases LibraryThing does a good job to define works, in other Wikipedia may be a better choice. The question 'Do you have a copy of the King James Bible?' can be answered very well with FRBR in two steps: 1. First you ask back - "do you mean the English Christian Bible first published by the Church of England in the 17th century" The answer could be: yes, I mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorized_King_James_Version 2. Provide a choice of frbr:manifestation or frbr:item that are connected to the URI of "King James Bible" in the first questions. Examples are: http://ebible.org/bible/kjv/kjvtxt.zip (Plain text version zipped) urn:isbn:9780826511362 (Vanderbilt University Press, 1969) .. > ... anyway, the point is -- you have to define 'holding', or you can't be > assured that the response to your request is the correct granularity of > information to answer the question you're trying to ask. Ok, then I'd define a holding an instance of frbr:item with the properties "location" (a building, an institution, an URL...), "identifier" (call-number, item-number, URL...) and "availability" (available, next week, only on campus, free for download...). As shown in my ad-hoc example "location" can be nested, but that's not the point. Defining holding is not the problem - you just have to look how holdings are *practically* used in libraries (instead of starting a theoretical discussion). The problem is more how to get the data out of library systems. Greetings, Jakob -- Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>, skype: nichtich Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany +49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de