Marjorie
 
There's no need to forward this to JSC, as I have registered everyone in JSC as a member of the dc-rda mailing list.
 
Cheers
 
Gordon

________________________________

From: List for discussion on Resource Description and Access (RDA) on behalf of Marjorie Bloss
Sent: Thu 12/13/2007 5:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Update on task group stuff


Many thanks, Gordon.  I'll send this out to the JSC.
 
Cordially,
 
Marjorie
Marjorie E. Bloss
2827 West Gregory Street
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1-773-519-4009 (mobile)
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	----- Original Message ----- 
	From: Gordon Dunsire <mailto:[log in to unmask]>  
	To: [log in to unmask] 
	Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2007 10:05 AM
	Subject: Update on task group stuff

	Dear all
	
	 
	
	A round-up of recent news and progress:
	
	 
	
	The FRBR Review Group decided at its IFLA 2007 meeting to create and declare namespaces for FRBR elements in RDF; the announcement can be found in the newly-published minutes of the meeting at http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/FRBR_RG_Mtg2007.pdf
	
	 
	
	I have said that I will act as liaison between this initiative and the Task Group.
	
	 
	
	I and a colleague at CDLR have been able to create three separate vocabularies for FRBR elements in the NSDL Metadata Registry Sandbox. The vocabularies cover:
	
	 
	
	FRBR entities: http://sandbox.metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/49.html
	
	FRBR relationships: http://sandbox.metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/64.html
	
	FRBR user tasks: http://sandbox.metadataregistry.org/vocabulary/show/id/69.html
	
	 
	
	Further work is required to
	
	 
	
	a) Review and restructure definitions and scope notes, which have been taken verbatim from the FRBR document; and
	
	b) Establish a real, persistent and stable base domain
	
	 
	
	The FRBR Review Group has been informed of this.
	
	 
	
	We have just recently found out about an earlier attempt to declare FRBR in RDF, carried out by Ian Davis and Richard Newman, at http://vocab.org/ and more specifically, http://vocab.org/frbr/core
	
	 
	
	We believe our work does not duplicate this earlier work because the earlier work did not have FRBR approval (it adds entities for super-classing, and renames some of the FRBR elements, etc.).
	
	 
	
	But what may be extremely useful for FRBR is the development of an ontology for the FRBR entity-relationships structure in OWL.
	
	 
	
	This work should inform our work in the DCMI RDA Task Group.
	
	 
	
	All comments and suggestions will be gratefully received.
	
	 
	
	I have added a page to the Task Group wiki to support this FRBR initiative, at http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/Namespace_20for_20FRBR_20entities_2felements_20in_20RDF
	
	 
	
	I have also drawn up a list of FRBR elements which have been used in DC applications or previously declared as namespaces; this can be accessed via another new TG wiki page at http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/FRBRCollisions
	
	 
	
	Although this is of minor direct interest to the TG, it throws up interesting issues which may be highly relevant to our work, including:
	
	 
	
	* Treatment of "relationships" as a SKOS vocabulary (relationship as concept) rather than RDF properties. We have chosen a preferred label for the concept behind the relationship (e.g. "Embodiment" rather than the reciprocal pair "is-embodied-as/has-embodiment") with the idea that the reciprocation is better handled in OWL.
	
	* Treatment of reciprocal relationships - SWAP has an asymmetric approach in some instances.
	
	* Preferred labels: capitalised or not?
	
	 
	
	Any thoughts from any of you?
	
	 
	
	The FRBR initiative does not seem to have informed the draft report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and recommendation 3.2.1.2 which states:
	
	 
	
	LC, JSC, and DCMI: Work jointly to specify and commission exploratory work to model and represent a Bibliographic Description Vocabulary, drawing on the work of FRBR and RDA, the Dublin Core Abstract Model, and appropriate semantic Web technologies (e.g., SKOS). Some preparation for this work has already been done in joint discussion of JSC and DCMI.
	
	 
	
	(Incidentally, am I the only person who thinks the suspension of work on RDA would actually negate all the other, mainly good, recommendations in this report? Or, which comes first, the chicken or the egg?)
	
	 
	
	Finally, I've added some additional links to the front page of the TG wiki to stuff like declaring a thesaurus in the semantic web, etc. because some of our RDA colleagues might not be aware of it, and for ready reference.
	
	 
	
	Note also, formally, that JSC recently restructured RDA to better fit FRBR and data models stuff, which is a good thing for our work (there's a link to the JSC announcement on the wiki front page).
	
	 
	
	Cheers
	
	 
	
	Gordon