Jakoblog — Das Weblog von Jakob Voß

Can SOBR help publishing library holdings?

I just participated in the German conference Semantic Web in Bibliotheken which took place in Hamburg this week. This year there were two slots for lightning talks, but unfortunately participants did not catch on, so we only had four of them. Lightning talks are a good chance to present something unfinished that you need input for, so I presented the Simplified Ontology for Bibliographic Resources (SOBR) as „FRBR light“. You can find the current specification of SOBR at github, which means the specification is still evolving and I’d like to get more feedback.

SOBR was caused by a discussion on the Library Linked Data mailing list about the (disputed) disjointedness of FRBR classes. SOBR has a history in the Document Availability Information API (DAIA), which SOBR might be merged into. The use case of both is publishing information about holdings from library catalogs as Linked Open Data. The information most requested is probably connected to holdings: library users only ask „where is it?“ and „how can I get it?“. In this questions, the little word „it“ refers to a specific publication. In the answers, however, „it“ usually refers to some holding or copy of this publication. Sometimes the holding contains more than the publication (for instance if you ask for an article in a book) and sometimes you get multiple holdings (for instance if you ask for a a large work that is split in multiple volumes). Sometimes there are multiple holdings with different content to choose from, because there are different editions, forms, translations etc. of the requested publication.

A long time ago, some librarians thought about similar questions and answers and came up with the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). I tried hard to accept FRBR (I even draw this ugly diagrams that people find when they look up FRBR in Wikipedia). But FRBR does not help me to publish existing library catalogs as Linked Open Data. In our catalog databases we have records that refer to editions, connected with records that refer to holdings (I’ll ignore the little exceptions and nasty special cases such as multiple holdings described by one look-like-a-holding-record). In addition there are some records that refer to series, works, and other types of abstract documents without direct holdings, which are connected to records that refer to editions.

Maybe we can simplify this to two entities: general documents (bibo:Document) and items (with frbr:Item) as special kind of documents. The current design of SOBR also contains a class for editions, but I am not sure whether this class is also needed. At least we need three properties to relate documents to items (daia:exemplar), to relate documents to editions (daia:edition?) and to relate documents to its parts (dcterms:hasPart). To avoid the need of blank nodes, I’d also define properties that relate documents to partial items (daia:extract = dcterms:hasPart + daia:exemplar) and to relate documents to partial editions (daia:editionPart?)

Feedback on SOBR is welcome, especially if you provide examples with existing URIs (or at least local identifiers to already existing data) instead of theoretical FRBR-like-made-up examples. The best way to find a good ontology for publishing library holdings is to actually publish data that describes library holdings! The following image is based on an example that connects a work from LibraryThing and from DBPedia with a partial edition from Worldcat, a full edition from German National Library, and a holding from Hamburg University:

@prefix bibo: <http://purl.org/ontology/bibo/> .
@prefix daia: <http://purl.org/ontology/daia/> .
@prefix frbr: <http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

<http://www.librarything.com/work/70394> a bibo:Document ;
  owl:sameAs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Living_My_Life> ;
  daia:edition <http://d-nb.info/1001703464> , [
    a bibo:Collection # , daia:Document
    ; dct:hasPart <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/656754414>
  ]
    ;
  # daia:exemplar <http://d-nb.info/1001703464> ; ?
  daia:editionPart <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/656754414> .

<http://d-nb.info/1001703464> a frbr:Item , bibo:Document ;
   daia:exemplar <http://uri.gbv.de/document/opac-de-18:epn:1220640794> .

image created with rdfdot

Social Cataloging in Wikipedia

Last week I gave an introduction into social tagging and cataloging for librarians (some German slides here at Slideshare). In a discussion on German Wikipedia about COinS I was pointed to the French Wikipedia: They have a special namespace référence to store more detailled bibliographic information (see MediaWiki-namespaces in general), some more information is collected in Projet:Références, but my French is too little to find out much. This example may demonstrate the concept:

The article „Première période intermédiaire égyptienne“ cites the source „Nicolas Grimal, Histoire de l’Égypte ancienne, 1988“. The citation provides a link to on a special page that lists several editions of the work. Actually this is another implementation of FRBR.

I like the idea of seggregating full bibliographic record and reference in the Wikipedia article, but the concrete solution is too complicated and limited. Wikipedia with flat text is just not the right tool to store bibliographic data. Maybe Semantic MediaWiki can help, but a multilingual approach like LibraryThing does is better. French Wikipedians should not have to duplicate cataloging efforts, but just point to LibraryThing, WorldCat or whatever bibliographic authority is usable. By the way most library catalouges are not usable in this sense – on the Web noone cares how good you data is if you cannot directly link to it and use it in other context.