Robert, thank you for your answer. To begin with, I don't speak for
BIBFRAME, not being in any way part of that development, but I would
like to reply to some points from a library point of view. What I
suspect that we have here are two things called "annotation" that
are considerably different in their usage. This does not mean that
they could not be brought together, but we should look beyond the
term itself to the use cases.
More inline. And I apologize in advance for any liberties that I
take in describing what I see as the library use case.
On 5/4/13 6:19 AM, Robert Sanderson
wrote:
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Of the above, the only one that I perceive as a library cataloging
data use case is the multi-lingual one. I also note that one of the
annotation types in OA is parallel to the library use case of
subject assignment. What I see here is a difference between the
annotation of documents, something similar to "citing" or
"commenting on," and the addition of information to a set of
descriptive metadata. It is for this reason that I propose that we
look closer at the use cases and determine if we aren't making too
much of the use of the term "annotation."
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AFAIK, provenance is on its way to becoming a generalized concept in
RDF, therefore is not unique to OA. Provenance will be very
important to libraries where the concept of "authoritativeness" of
data is essential to our extensive sharing of metadata.
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There will be many on this list who have not read the OA
documentation, and I admit that there were parts that I just skimmed
through because they didn't seem relevant to my interests. But there
are a number of us who are following the W3C semantic web work as
closely as we can. At the same time, there is much beyond BIBFRAME
that is not explicit in the BIBFRAME documents but that is deeply
embedded in library culture and practices, and therefore may not be
obvious on a reading of the BIBFRAME documentation.
BIBFRAME currently is greatly under-specified, so comparing the
BIBFRAME document to the OA document probably isn't useful. Which is
why I suggest that we compare the use cases and intention to see
what overlap of interests exists.
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OA uses Dublin Core types vocabulary for this. That may be a
solution, but only if one accepts the OA structure. What we in the
library world need to think about, IMO, is how far we want to go
with typing our annotations, and what the trade-off is in terms of
complexity.
Note that there is nothing about library data that would prevent
anyone from applying an Open Annotation to the data. The question
is, do we want this to be the only way to, for example, assign a
subject heading to a Work? Or to link reviews to a bibliographic
description? Library data has a different mechanism for linking
subject headings to Works, called "Authorities." This was my point
in the earlier email [1] about separating the basic elements of
cataloging (resulting in bibliographic metadata) from user-supplied
"annotations." If the latter, then OA could be the standard for
user-supplied annotations, while library data would continue to use
its duality of "description and access."
What you may not know is that the concept of "annotation" is far
from accepted in library cataloging. It was introduced with BIBFRAME
and my guess is that the vast majority of librarians do not have
this concept in their mental tool-kit. My impression is that
BIBFRAME is so far from "cooked" that what we see today in the
documentation may not be what is at the end. All the more reason to
have this conversation about annotations now while BIBFRAME is still
somewhat fluid. I can tell you that once a standard gets accepted
and implemented in the library world, changes become extremely
costly, which is why we are struggling today with a 40-year-old data
standard that no longer meets our needs.
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If we see BIBFRAME annotations being assigned by catalogers, then
"motivation" isn't a terribly relevant concept. Cataloging follows
cataloging rules and isn't "motivated" individually. However, I can
see a need to type the annotations, and that could be through a
property sub-type, an annotation sub-class, or using a mechanism
like OA motivations (although not actually OA Motivations). Again,
it seems worth thinking about the variety of annotations that
libraries may use, and the best way to manage and extend that.
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I wouldn't assume that the BIBFRAME data will exist *as is* in the
open world. It may (I hope) be more easily translatable to the open
world, but libraries need a sharable data format that replaces the
current record format. So I do think that it is appropriate to
*also* think of BIBFRAME as a record, and that some of its
"record-ness" may remain within a library silo because it is only
relevant there. A primary use case for library metadata is the
sharing of descriptions of published materials that make up the
inventories of library holdings, and are key to the management
functions of library systems (acquisitions, collection development,
circulation). These descriptions are indeed "records" regardless of
the technology being used to hold the metadata. The
soon-to-be-current cataloging rules separate "description" and
"access." To my mind, the "access" part is most interesting as
linked data, while the "description" part functions as a bound
package (c.f. ISBD as the data "core").
That said, librarians are having a hard time wrapping their heads
around the open world idea of data. We've had records for a long
time, even before they were digital. We can go back to the "unit
entry" of the book catalogs of pre-1850 if we want to trace our
basic concepts. This makes it harder to stand back and question our
assumptions about data.
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As I say above, until we study the library use cases, what we have
here may just be a coincidence of terminology. I believe that is the
first step: compare use cases.
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And I hope this does, as well. Feel free to post this to the OA
list. (The archives are open [2] but the discussion is very detailed
and mostly does not seem relevant to the library use case, as I see
it.)
kc
[1]
http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1305&L=bibframe&T=0&P=751
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-openannotation/
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--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
