Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> I'm curious why you think that doesn't work?  Isn't "place of 
> publication" a characteristic of a particular manifestation? While, 
> "title", according to traditional library practices where you take it 
> from the title page, is also a characteristic of a particular 
> manifestation, is it not? ("uniform title" is _usually_ a 
> characteristic of a work, unless we get into music cataloging and some 
> other 'edge' cases. Our traditional practices -- which aren't actually 
> changed that much by RDA, are rather confusing.)

Well, I was responding to Ross' statement that bibo and FRBR could be 
used in combination, depending on whether one was at that moment 
describing 'bibliographic things' or 'work things'. bibo doesn't have a 
uniform title, so the question is: can you use a bibo title and say that 
it is a work title? I thought that Ross was indicating something of that 
nature -- that you could have a FRBR 'work thing' with bibo properties. 
I'm trying to understand how that works since Work is a class. Don't you 
have to indicate the domain and range of a property in its definition?

RDA tries to solve this by creating different properties for every 
concept+FRBR entity: title of the work (Work), title proper 
(Manifestation). [I don't understand why expressions don't have 
titles.... a translation is an expression, after all.]
>
> I am confused about what one would do about the fact that RDA defines 
> attributes a bit different than FRBR itself does. It's not too 
> surprising -- FRBR is really just a draft, hardly tested in the world. 
> When RDA tried to make it a bit more concrete, it's not surprising 
> that they found they had to make changes to make it workable. Not sure 
> what to do about that in the grand scheme of things, if RDA and FRBR 
> both end up registering different vocabularies. I guess we'll just 
> have two different vocabularies though, which isn't too shocking I guess.
>
I'm not sure there's anything to do, but I do know that the developers 
of RDA feel very strongly that in RDA they have 'implemented' FRBR, so 
we have to find a way to integrate FRBR and RDA in the registered RDA 
vocabulary. I agree that there's no problem with having RDA and FRBR as 
two different vocabularies, it's the effort of bringing them together 
that boggles me. I feel like it leaves a lot of loose ends. I'd be happy 
to see FRBR revised, or to have it re-defined without the attributes, 
thus allowing metadata developers to use the bibliographic relationship 
properties with any set of descriptive elements.

I'm having trouble with the FRBR Group 1 entities as classes. I see them 
instead as relationships, and vocab.org does seem to treat them as 
relationships, not as 'things.' I see a distinct difference between a 
person entity and a work entity, because there is no thing that is a 
work. I see work as a relationship between two bibliographic statements. 
(This is vague in my mind, so I won't be surprised if it doesn't make 
sense....) As an example, if I have a group of bibliographic properties, 
say an author and a title, and I say:

Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann --> expresses --> Der Zauberberg, by 
Thomas Mann

then I have created an 'expression to work' relationship, and so Der 
Zauberberg is a Work. If I do this, I don't need an explicit Work title. 
If I have a badly created Manifestation that has on its title page: 
Magic Mountian, I can do:

Magic Mountian, published by x in y --> manifests --> Magic Mountain, by 
Thomas Mann --> expresses --> Der Zauberberg, by Thomas Mann

In this way, I don't have to declare different title elements with 
different domains/ranges (which is essentially what RDA does in an 
awkward way) to connect them to the FRBR Group 1 classes, and the FRBR 
properties become more usable because you don't have to declare your 
bibliographic properties in terms of the FRBR classes. Now, IF you can 
use any properties, say, dcterms:title, with the FRBR properties, like 
"manifests" then the whole thing is solved. I think it works that way, 
but that is definitely NOT what RDA has done; it has incorporated the 
domain (FRBR class) in the bibliographic properties. I think that what I 
describe above in my examples works; and if it does, then the problem is 
with RDA.

In the end, it's the relationship between properties and classes in FRBR 
and RDA that is giving me a headache, and the headache mainly has to do 
with FRBR group 1. I think this is my bete noir, and so I will now go 
read something soothing and let my blood pressure drop a bit.

kc

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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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