Thanks very much to Eric for the full response and all the other contributions to the thread so far.

The argument for having a vocabulary over which you have some level of control clearly makes sense and I think the argument in favour has been well expressed by Ross and re-iterated by Eric.

I would echo the concerns expressed about the practical issues around relying on mappings between bibframe and other common vocabularies - but I also take the point made by Jeff that if we look ahead far enough to a point where bibframe is in common use, we can expect some or all of the technology issues to be resolved.

On 13 Mar 2013, at 21:13, Eric Miller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Our initial linked data analysis identified literally dozens of namespaces used in the Library community reflecting various stages of experimentation. More if you start to broaden analysis to the include museums, archives, galleries, etc.. And even more if you broaden into more of how we might imagine patrons / others adding value to this data.  This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone familiar with RDF / Linked Data. There isn't one vocabulary that works (or will work) for everything. ;)

I'd absolutely agree with this - which is perhaps why the idea of a 'bibframe' vocabulary worries me. While I absolutely see the point of a framework in which libraries operate to describe resources, approaching the description of resources from a library perspective only worries me more. Even if we are creating new vocabularies (for the reasons already put forward), I wonder if there is an argument for having a more 'small bits' approach to building these than trying to create a single vocabulary to tackle the whole of library description?

If this was done carefully we may even encourage other communities to take up some of the family of vocabularies used within bibframe which, to be honest, seems unlikely if what we end up with is a big 'library vocabulary'. It might also say to the rest of the community that we ('libraries') understand that this isn't about creating 'one vocab to rule them all' :)

It may be that some of the concerns I have can be mitigated by simply declaring equivalence between bibframe entities and entities described by others using other vocabularies. I also acknowledge Richard's point that 'bibframe' may not be what is typically exposed to the outside world. However I think there is a high risk that at this stage bibframe is seen as being too insular - I'm not sure if there is a solution to this, but I'm concerned we may lose support of those who have already invested time and effort in building vocabularies and describing things that libraries are interested in (both inside and outside the library community) - which I would argue are the very communities we should be seeking to engage.

Owen

Owen Stephens
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