Matthew & Jonathan:
I agree with both Matthew's bottom-up and Jonathan's sets. To me, a Work
is a grouping of Expressions, and that means that the "workness" exists
even if you don't have the information you need to create a Work entity.
(One of my problems with WEMI is that there seems to be an assumption
that all of the information to fill in all of the entities will be
there... which is not the case, see below.) Each level, to me, is the
sum of the levels below it, so the manifestations add up to what you
currently know about one or more expressions, and what you can deduce
about the work. It's a build-up process.
My "resource" btw was intended to be more "superWork" -- WEMI, in my
mind, are parts of something, not wholes in themselves. The fact that
they are not whole is what gives me a hard time in thinking of them as
entities. A Manifestation doesn't have subjects? Or an author? Hmmmm. So
WEMI is an interdependent set of descriptions, not separate entities.
That gives me pause.
So how will we, in practice, fill these in? I used as an example a book
that I found on the street in Berkeley (I get great books out of boxes
of discards here):
The Conquest of Bread
by Peter Kropotkin
New York Vanguard Press1926
No mention of translation. If I'm cataloging this and don't want to go
hunting around for more info, I cannot fill in much relating to the W. I
don't know the original Work title, I don't know what language it was
originally written in. This is probably not the first version, since he
died in 1921.
I need to create a manifestation "entity" without a work "entity". But I
want my manifestation to have an author and subject headings. What can I
do? I think I should be able to create an entity based on what I know.
And if it goes into a larger context where manifestation author: Peter
Kropotkin and manifestation title: The conquest of bread matches a
record that also has a link to a work with:
Author Kropotkin, Petr Alekseevich, kni?az?, 1842-1921.
Work Title Conquête du pain.
Then my data can hook up to that data and in a sense gets connected to
the W, which I couldn't do on my own. But maybe I gave it the subject
"Agriculture and Communism" and the W it hooks up to gave it the subject
"Anarchism". Then my subject enhances the W.
So the W is an ever-changing set that is the sum of the E's and M's (and
I's) in its universe. And if it's designed as linked data, all of these
parts can more easily come together.
[In my mind, which draws much better than my hands do, these are like
tinker toys or jigsaw puzzle pieces, or even molecules, that float
around and fit together when they meet. So I may have piece f, g, and l
and the Work has piece g, s and z, and when they meet they form g, f, l,
s, z.]
kd
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-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 15:35:30 EDT