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.

(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?')


... 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.

-----
Joe Hourcle