Friends
I beg to disagree on viewing the expressions (only) as sets of manifestations. As abstractions of manifestations, yes.
Also, an expression could be a legal object, which exists even before one manifestation of it exists: it is the object
of a copyright and it could be "reified" in the contract between the publisher and the right holder.
Besides, when we say "this book is about The Bible", we mean "The Bible" not as a set of expressions, but as an
abstraction of all its expressions.
On the other hand, I agree with Karen that it could be (conceptually, or even technically) useful to have an
abstraction of all the FRBR classes, say "entity", because they share some properties (e.g. being a subject of a work
or having a type). See attached my ("ancient", i.e. 2003) UML diagram of FRBR :-)
Dan Matei
Received on Wed Oct 21 2009 - 16:30:16 EDT
