Re: FRBRization in LT, was: Personal perspectives on catalog use

I agree completely with Tim about the weakness of binary representations - which is the point of my Future is Analogue post. However, my argument is that an environment that allows open linking allows you to move away from this binary representation. Therefore I disagree with Tim about RDF. It isn't that a single triplet allows the expression of these nuances - 'The sky has the colour blue' is a single RDF triplet from a single perspective. However, since 'The sky' and 'colour' and 'blue' all have URIs others can express an opinion within the framework.

So, Tim says 'The sky has the colour blue', and I say 'The sky has the colour azure' - we can say these are complimentary statements. We can know that Tim and I mean the same sky. Many people can make this type of statement.

When we start to put this information together for presentation (i.e. for a user) then we can either express a consolidation of the colours expressed by everyone (likely to represent a wide range of opinion), a community (what do other people like me think is the colour of the sky), or an authority (what colour does the Weather Channel say the sky is)?

When Jonathon says:

" Of course, in the real world, we don't just have one 
internally-consistent system. It may be (and in fact already is!)  that 
in the OCLC system a certain book belongs to one workset, while in the 
(eg) LT system it belongs to another. And to make matters more 
confusing, even the worksets themselves won't necessarily have a one to 
one correspondence. We can think about how to write software that can 
take this conflicting info from multiple systems, and reconcile it into 
some kind of coherent view for our users. That view certainly could 
reveal the existence of different determinations of work-set-membership, 
if we can figure out clever ways to display this information without 
being overwhelming."

I think he is describing exactly this situation - we have multiple views of the world that we want to reconcile and present for our users. The difference between this situation and where I think we ought to be is that currently we have multiple systems that don't allow any explicit linkages to be made between them. As we moved to more openly linked data, it should be possible for more explicit linkages to be made and so allow the expression of varying views of the data in a way that can be exploited more easily (or that's the idea)

Owen

Owen Stephens
Assistant Director: eStrategy and Information Resources
Central Library
Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
London
SW7 2AZ
 
t: +44 (0)20 7594 8829
e: o.stephens_at_imperial.ac.uk
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Tim Spalding
> Sent: 17 February 2009 19:48
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] FRBRization in LT, was: Personal perspectives on
> catalog use
> 
> No, we're binary now too. You can write "Disambiguation notices," and
> these sometime get at some of the differences. But a non-binary system
> would be hard. We've thought about providing links between works with
> a defined number of standard relationships, but also an option to
> write you own-so you can connect Paradise Lost to Frankenstein and His
> Dark Materials and explain why. You could probably vote things up and
> down-something we use in other contexts. I'm not sure that would be a
> good idea, though.
> 
> I would say, though, that the RDF triplet subject predicate object-the
> sky has the color blue-miss nuances like "how blue?" "who's looking at
> the sky?" "is that man your friend?" etc.
> 
> > I think ultimately ANY model of reality inside software data
> structures is
> > going to be 'shoehorning reality into boxes'. That's just the nature
> of the
> > beast.  The map is not the territory. Our task is to make the map
> > sufficiently good and flexible, to make sure we've got the right
> choice of
> > boxes to shoehorn things into, including setting up the framework for
> future
> > uses we can't think of now  But there's no way to get reality itself
> inside
> > a database, it's always only going to be a model.
> 
> Yes, absolutely. But we can represent things that weren't represented
> before. Even the card catalog represented things that didn't make it
> into computers-the age of the card, its wear, the informative but
> amateur correction made by a scholar. Library systems need to add all
> that back in.
> 
> Tim