On 2 November 2006, Alexander Johannesen wrote:

> I can't get to that site (is it down?), but a few words on what you're
> trying to do (is it a technical approach, model approach, philosophical
> approach?), and how you want to do it would be great.

It's back up now.  Sorry about that.  Some one-time server stuff was going
on.

OpenFRBR will be all of those, I think, because it'll be figuring out new
things as it goes.  There is no full FRBR implementation so there are more
questions than answers.  I don't know how the database will look, what
Ajaxy stuff will help users manipulate information, how to let people do
the four FRBR user tasks, how to handle complicated relationships between
things, or any of that.  It'll be fun to figure it out.

On the site, I say what it might look like in a few months: "A person
grabs a book off the shelf and enters the ISBN into OpenFRBR. OpenFRBR
checks all available sources and figures out what is known about the book,
what work it is, what expression it is, what other entities are involved,
and how they are related. The user will be able to confirm what is right,
change what is wrong, and add what else is known. The resulting
arrangement of information will be available in a standard format for
other systems to use. Everything will be searchable."

If it gets to that, I'll be happy.  I'm new to Rails, so I'll be figuring
out a lot as I go.  I've never done anything with a shared source code
repository, either.

I do think FRBR is very useful and really needs an example, if not a
reference, implementation, so that people can say, "Oh, this is why we
should bother with it.  You know, I could use this for X, and for Y ..."

Bill
--
William Denton : Toronto, Canada : www.miskatonic.org : www.frbr.org