*OpenWEMI - A minimally constrained vocabulary for Work, Expression, 
Manifestation, Item*

To facilitate the use of the metadata concepts in  Work, Expression, 
Manifestation, and Item (WEMI) outside of the FRBR/LRM vocabulary, a 
more general vocabulary that encodes WEMI with minimal constraints and 
very general definitions is needed. OpenWEMI [1] has been developed to 
fill this need. This is a project supported by the Dublin Core Metadata 
Initiative (DCMI).[2] The vocabulary is defined under a DCMI namespace: 
https://ns.dublincore.org/openwemi/.

The RDF vocabulary of OpenWEMI consists of classes for Work, Expression, 
Manifestation and Item, as well as a super-class, Endeavor, that groups 
these concepts. The classes are not defined as disjoint, as they are in 
library data. Relationships between the classes are defined as 
properties that maintain the direction of general-to-specific of WEMI 
but that allow various combinations of classes to be employed. The 
vocabulary also includes four properties that can be used to express 
that any two resources are related through one or more WEMI classes: 
commonWork, commonExpression, commonManifestation and commonItem.

The OpenWEMI vocabulary can be used directly but the practical 
assumption is that it will be used as a general model for the definition 
of context-specific metadata vocabularies. For example, a subclass of 
the OpenWEMI Work could be a "MusicWork", an "ArtWork", or an 
"ArchitectureWork". Anyone wishing to make use of the concepts of WEMI 
can now do so, utilizing the OpenWEMI vocabulary as a meta-model for 
their data.

The documentation for OpenWEMI is on the Dublin Core web site.[1] The 
RDF vocabulary file is available in Turtle format.[3] Examples and other 
documents, including GitHub issues, are publicly available.[4]

Background

In 1998 a working group of the International Federation of Library 
Associations published a new and innovative model for library catalog 
data, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Data (FRBR).[5] It 
included the four WEMI entities. The general concepts of WEMI have been 
found useful by metadata creators unrelated to the library catalog use 
case. Some developers have borrowed the WEMI concepts and integrated 
them into their own applications.[6] These uses usually do not employ 
the definitions and constraints of the LRM model, nor are there formal 
vocabulary relations between these uses and the library vocabulary.

[1] https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/openwemi/
[2] https://dublincore.org/
[3] https://dcmi.github.io/openwemi/ns/openWEMI.ttl
[4] https://github.com/dcmi/openwemi/
[5] IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic 
Records. (2009) Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. Den 
Haag. http://archive.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr_2008.pdf
[6] Coyle, Karen. Works, Expressions, Manifestations, Items: An 
Ontology. Code4lib Journal, Issue 53, 2022-05-09. 
https://journal.code4lib.org/articles/16491

-- 
Karen Coyle
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http://kcoyle.net