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I think Thomas Berger points to an area in which BIBFRAME could potentially make an improvement on existing resource description practices. 

As was said, the statement of responsibility is intended to reflect how a resource represents itself, without imposing rigorous normalization. This serves a purpose for users (although maybe not, as Thomas points out), but it also (primarily?) serves a purpose for catalogers when they make authority records for the entities involved in the creation of a work.

This can fairly be straightforward, as in the case of "Der Zauberberg / by Th[omas] Mann," but it can become quite complex in instances of multiple authorship or multiple roles (as is the case in film and theater productions, for example). So, for a feature film, we might have (from http://bibframe.org/resources/BUx1406479872/):

<bf:titleStatement>El corazón del bosque / una película de Arándano, S.A. ; producida por Luis Megino ; guión, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón y Luis Megino ; dirección, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.</bf:titleStatement>

Catalogers talk about "establishing" a name based on "usage." The statement of responsibility provides evidence that catalogers can point to as justification when choosing the "authorized" form of a name. In a name authority record, differing usages are cited as variant access points (as shown in Thomas's example authority record for Mao). Further, in RDA authority records, role terms (such as "una película de," "producida," or "guión," above) can be cited as evidence for establishing an entity's occupation or area of activity, which might be additionally helpful for disambiguation purposes.

In its current form (in both MARC and BIBFRAME), the statement of responsibility serves to provide human-readable information that can then be interpreted by catalogers and encoded in authority records. Of course, this is a very string-based approach. Still, the basic intention of establishing a preferred form of a name (the way an entity would seem to prefer to be known in publication) does seem valid as a resource description practice.

However, if this information could be structured up-front (as Thomas suggests), we might have a basis for the automatic generation of preferred and variant name forms in authority records (or even the automatic generation of new authority records). 

Now, BIBFRAME already has a Title Entity class, and I think the validity of this construct has been debated here because it was seen as a simple "translation" from MARC encoding. 

Wouldn't it be more useful to create something like a Responsibility Entity class in BIBFRAME? This would not be a replication of MARC encoding, but would provide the ability to structure data in new ways.

So, we might split up the statement of responsibility for each creator/contributor:

<bf:responsibilityStatement rdf:resource="http://bibframe.org/resources/resp1"/>
<bf:responsibilityStatement rdf:resource="http://bibframe.org/resources/resp2"/>
... etc.

and then link to Responsibility resources that could be structured accordingly:

<bf:Responsibility rdf:about="http://bibframe.org/resources/resp1">    
  <bf:label>Arándano, S.A.</bf:label>
  <bf:isUsageFor rdf:resource="http://bibframe.org/resources/organization1"/>
</bf:Responsibility>

The hypothetical bf:isUsageFor property could link to the bf:Authority for the organization in question:

<bf:Organization rdf:about="http://bibframe.org/resources/organization1">
  <bf:authorizedAccessPoint>Arándano (Firm)</bf:authorizedAccessPoint>
  <bf:hasAuthority rdf:resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/example"/>
</bf:Organization>

Although this would add a layer of complexity, maybe it would be worth it?

Tim


--
Tim A. Thompson
Metadata Librarian (Spanish/Portuguese Specialty)
Princeton University Library

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On 7/27/14, 3:41 AM, Thomas Berger wrote:
With XML documents there was a distinction between data centric
and document centric approaches, often characterized by the
permission of "mixed content". Traditional bibliographic
records somehow redundantly follow both approaches, i.e. you
have "data" in MARC 100 and 700 and the same facts recorded again
as parts of the text in 245$c. Especially in cases where the
redundancy is not very high, i.e. when the form recorded in
the statement of responsibility grossly deviates from the form
given in the heading one would wish for additional markup
linking the substring in the SoR with the heading or - like TEI does -
embedding heading information in markup distinguishing the name
in the SoR.

Now RDF (with string data types) enforces a strict data-centric
view on our bibliographic situation which even in circumstances
we usually consider as "pure data" fails to provide appropriate
descriptions.

As I said earlier in this thread:

3. I'm not convinced that it makes sense to convert the entire document that is a "bibliographic description" to RDF, any more than I would want to convert an entire web page to RDF. RDF was designed to surface the data hidden in web pages, not to turn the entire web into triples.

There are aspects of our data that are document-like, and I see no reason to force these into RDF if they don't fit comfortably. We need to turn the question around, from "How do I fit this into RDF?" to "What do I want to do with this data?" If we wish to provide users with notes about the resource, reviews, or handy hints as to where to find it on the library shelves, there's no reason that these have to be in RDF. If they are, it is for the convenience of processing, not because they result in useful RDF (which is, as you say, designed for linkable data).

At the same time, I question the need to carry forward certain practices, like reversing author names to the comma-delimited form, which exists solely to support alphabetical order [1]. We (will) have an identifier for the person, and we can have any number of display forms. We need to re-think our data for the web, not try to turn the web into a card catalog.

kc
[1] Where I question alphabetical order: http://kcoyle.net/presentations/thinkDiff.pdf

--
Karen Coyle
[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet