Another thought on this:

We should consider that the transition from 19th century style library 
cataloging to [whatever the future will bring] could be incremental. A 
solution like HTML+RDFa is a single step in a multi-step process. 
Knowing that more steps will take place means that we don't have to 
solve all of the problems today.

OCLC's use of schema.org does not attempt to translate the entire 
bibliographic record to RDF. It picks the low-hanging fruit (controlled 
headings, some, but not all, identifiers) and makes them available for 
linking. It essentially extracts what it can from MARC to RDFa. 
Eventually, the balance between text and actionable data could shift, 
but it doesn't have to do so all at once.

Could BIBFRAME take a similar approach? I'm not sure what it would look 
like, but if I can wax metaphorically, I see something like the egg with 
a chick and a yolk. As the chick grows, the yolk is consumed and grows 
smaller.

Alternatively, this could all mean that I haven't had my breakfast yet. ;-)

kc

On 8/1/14, 9:18 AM, Robert Sanderson wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> In my experience, RDF and Linked Data can do both presentation based 
> information (eg here is content to present directly to the user, 
> without semantics eg [1]) and it can do semantic, descriptive 
> information (here is a rich description of the resource, say a book or 
> annotation eg [2]) but both at once is very challenging without simply 
> repeating everything in a for-machines way and a for-humans way as per 
> the current titleStatement, providerStatement, and one assumes 
> authorStatement, subjectStatement, etc.
>
> Here are two radical ideas, for which the boat has probably long since 
> sailed, but I'll throw them out there regardless.
>
> 1. Don't try to mix them up.  Have two completely separate 
> descriptions, where one is intended for humans to read, and the other 
> is intended for machines to reason upon and search.  A machine will 
> only ever throw a transcribed string through to the user, so make it 
> easy for them to do that by separating the non-semantic information 
> from the semantic information, with links between them.
>
> 2.  Mix them up using the appropriate technology: HTML + RDFA. 
>  Instead of thinking about triples for everything, instead create the 
> HTML that you want the user to see.  Then annotate that HTML with RDFA 
> properties to add the semantics into the record (and really a record 
> now, not a graph).  This way there's only one record to maintain that 
> has both, but uses presentation technology for presenting things to 
> users, and semantic technology for enabling machines to understand the 
> information.
>
> Basically -- use the right tools for the job.  RDF has a hard time 
> representing transcriptions outside of non-semantic strings because it 
> was never intended to do that.  Order in RDF is a complete pain, 
> because a graph is inherently unordered, but there are very real use 
> cases that require order.  On the other hand, RDF is fantastic for 
> controlled data as that is precisely its intended usage.  We should 
> make the most appropriate use of the tools that we have available to 
> us, rather than treating everything as a nail.
>
> Best,
>
> Rob
>
> [1].  The IIIF Presentation API is focused on this approach of giving 
> information intended for a client to display, while still being useful 
> linked data by referencing existing semantic descriptions and 
> following REST and JSON-LD. http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.0/
> [2].  The Open Annotation work is a rich data model that provides 
> semantics for web annotation, but says almost nothing about 
> presentation. http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
>
>
>
> -- 
> Rob Sanderson
> Technology Collaboration Facilitator
> Digital Library Systems and Services
> Stanford, CA 94305

-- 
Karen Coyle
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m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet