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Dear Karen,

> The cataloguing type of use cases I would see as
> clearly annotations:
> 
> * Reviews / Notes
> * Tagging / Subject classification
> * Citations

--  I just wanted to call out "Subject classification."   It's certainly not that I necessarily agree or disagree with the others, but that I recall having a short off-hand discussion about whether subject assignment and classification assignment might better be expressed as an Annotation.

This quickly gets caught up in the notion (a misunderstanding, actually) that BIBFRAME Annotations are somehow second-class resources to BIBFRAME Works and Instances (they're not).  There is an automatic recoil, with an individual expressing "Subjects are integral with the work.  They're not Annotations."  However, if one accepts the definition of a BIBFRAME Annotation as additional information where the "who" is known and valued, it's just additional description.  Applying this type of approach to subject assignment could have interesting results.  My first thought was copy-cataloging, but that is dependent on how often subjects are modified as part of the copy-cataloging process.  Nevertheless, it was important, at least with classication, in MARC to provide a subfield for "source of number," suggesting that there was, at some point, value knowing *who* assigned the classification number.  The idea of "who" *could* be extended to subjects as Annotations, where it might be equally interesting to know that LC or NLM or Harvard or some other institution assigned specific headings (one could imagine the NLM ones would have a medical bent, and not just because they probably come from MeSH, and therefore have additional value because of that fact).

I'm certainly not saying that I wholeheartedly endorse this approach, but I found it interesting that I brought this up at one point in the past and here it is quite independently presented again.  

Is what I describe the same as what you were thinking?

Yours,
Kevin



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
> Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2013 11:02 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] Annotations (Was: Documents and improvements)
> 
> Rob - thanks for your comments, and just a few more of mine. I'll try
> to reduce things down a bit.
> 
> First, it has occurred to me that, perhaps ironically, the "Functional
> Requirements for Authority Data", FRAD, [1] is very close to OA.
> Unfortunately, the English version isn't available online, but if you
> grab one of the ones whose language you can make out, all that really
> matters is Figure 2 (p. 7 in the French version, for example). It's not
> exactly the same, but I sense a similarity in the intent, especially in
> terms of making clear WHO is making the statement. FRAD adds one more
> thing, which is under which rules the statement is being made. I could
> imagine, therefore, BIBFRAME authorities looking much like OA if FRAD
> is adopted.
> 
> On 5/5/13 2:17 AM, Robert Sanderson wrote:
> 
> Agreed, however these were simply to demonstrate that annotations
> expressed in RDF require more than a single reified triple, to refute
> the claim that we're simply reinventing RDF graphs. �There needs to be
> an ontology and defined structure.
> 
> Yes, and this is bringing up for me some work I'm doing around the
> Dublin Core Application Profiles [2]. I need to catch some other folks
> to have a discussion of this, but will get back to you if anything
> interesting arises.
> Yes, definitely. �The cataloguing type of use cases I would see as
> clearly annotations:
> 
> * Reviews / Notes
> * Tagging / Subject classification
> * Citations
> 
> Essentially, when the information is provided by a third party, then it
> would be good to be expressed as an Annotation such that the provenance
> information is maintained and is compatible with other systems that use
> Open Annotation.
> 
> I'm still having a hard time with the dividing line between stuff and
> annotations of stuff. A recent article explaining the OA concept [3]
> said:
> 
> �"Annotations describe resources with additional information, which is
> valu-
> ��� able to other users, who are searching and browsing resource
> collections."
> 
> If you have "additional information" then there must be "non-additional
> information" -- and if you have a third party then there must be a
> first party (the second seems to get skipped over in that analogy). I
> don't think this is a generalizable question (one person's
> "additional"... etc.), but at least for any community like libraries
> some definition is going to be needed if annotations will have some
> operational meaning. That's what I think is not clear (yet) in the
> BIBFRAME document. I suspect that the division in library data will be
> based on provenance, but that's not how BIBFRAME defines annotation.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The point I was trying to make is that the bibframe annotation model
> has a property bf:annotationBodyLiteral, which has a literal as the
> object. �The Open Annotation model explicitly does not allow this, for
> several important and well discussed reasons. �Thus a point where the
> two models are not compatible.
> 
> Right. But then again, DC types doesn't include "literal" as a type.
> The whole typing thing is something I would need to think about more.
> If your only interest is literal v. URI, then the BIBFRAME choice is
> fine. If you have a video or sound file, that would be a URI. Something
> that is interesting in the OA model is that it allows you to make
> statements about the thing the URI points to [e.g. annotating a
> particular coordinate area on a map]. I hadn't thought about that, and
> now will have to go back to the OA document and see where that fits in.
> This is one of those areas where the "meta" aspect of library data has
> an affect. Must think more.....
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 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? OrI wouldn't assume that the BIBFRAME data will exist *as
> is* in the open world.
> 
> Then I would seriously question why RDF is being used at all.
> 
> I see this differently, perhaps because of my work on Application
> Profiles. I think that many communities will have an internal view of
> their data, and another "face" that they present to the open world. The
> basic structure of RDF, that is, triples, and the use of defined
> ontologies, is a good way to organize data whether it is open or not.
> In fact, there are enterprise uses of linked data. Modeling your
> enterprise data on RDF makes it much more likely that you will be able
> to extract a public view. In the Dublin Core arena we are looking at
> Application Profiles as a way to add the constraints that are needed
> within a community or enterprise that has some non-open needs, while
> easily allowing the derivation of an open view.
> 
> 
> 
> Was the choice of annotation as a model discussed on this list (and
> hence available in the archives) or was it simply presented fait
> accompli?
> 
> Rob, what you and I are doing here is the full extent of our ability to
> interact in the BIBFRAME process. If you look at the "Contribute" page
> [4] of BIBFRAME you will see that the only involvement for the
> community in the BIBFRAME development is discussion on this list.
> Discussion that, like this thread, takes place generally between list
> members with no direct involvement in BIBFRAME development. I would
> have simply replied to you individually, but I'm of the mind that a few
> readers on the list might find our musings interesting. In terms of
> having any influence over the development of BIBFRAME, I have no such
> conceit.
> 
> kc
> 
> [1] http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-
> authority-data
> [2] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-dsp/
> [3]
> http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems+and+applications/j
> ournal/11042
> [4] http://bibframe.org/contribute/
> 
> --
> Karen Coyle
> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet