Sorry for my previous post, I did not want to send it to the
list
Consultora
DIGIBÍS
c/ Alenza 4, 5ª Planta
Madrid 28003
Tel.: 914 320 888
De:
Enviado el: martes, 20 de enero de
2015 10:49
Para: '
Asunto: RE: [BIBFRAME] Real World
Object: simple definition
Gracias por todos los enlaces
interesantísimos de LOD
Solo quería comentar esta idea fantástica
de que un registro no es una RWO, para no serlo la guerra que dan, la de
espacio de memoria que ocupan y la de migraciones, cambios masivos, juegos de
caracteres, etc.
Evidentemente hay que distinguir entre un
objeto y la representación de un objeto que es a su vez un objeto, si es que
estoy entendiendo Real World
Ahora es divertidísimo
Consultora
DIGIBÍS
c/ Alenza 4, 5ª Planta
Madrid 28003
Tel.: 914 320 888
De:
Enviado el: viernes, 16 de enero
de 2015 18:39
Para: [log in to unmask]
Asunto: [BIBFRAME] Real World
Object: simple definition
I posted this today on my
blog, because folks were asking about this mysterious RWO thing. This is my
take on a simple perspective we could use. All open for discussion, of course,
and no, this is hardly exhaustive, just a conversation starter.
[at: http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2015/01/real-world-objects.html]
I was asked a question about the meaning and import of the RDF concept of
"Real World Object" (RWO) and didn't give a very good answer off the
cuff. I'll try to make up for that here.
The concept of RWO comes out of the artificial intelligence (AI) community.
Imagine that you are developing robots and other machines that must operate
within the same world that you and I occupy. You have to find a way to
"explain," in a machine-operational way, everything in our world:
stairs and ramps, chairs and tables, the effect of gravity on a cup when you
miss placing it on the table, the stars, love and loyalty (concepts are also
objects in this view). The AI folks have actually set a goal to create such
descriptions, which they call ontologies, for everything in the world; for
every RWO.
You might consider this a conceit, or a folly, but that's the task they have
set for themselves.
The original Scientific American article that described the semantic web used
as its example intelligent 'bots that would manage your daily calendar and make
appointments for you. This was far short of the AI "ontology of
everything" but the result that matters to us now is that there have been
AI principles baked into the development of RDF, including the concept of the
RWO.
RWO isn't as mysterious as it may seem, and I can provide a simple example from
our world. The MARC record for a book has the book as its RWO, and most of its
data elements "speak" about the book. At the same time, we can say
things about the MARC record, such as who originally created it, and who edited
it last, and when. The book and the record are different things, different
RWO's in an RDF view. That's not controversial, I would assume.
Our difficulties arise because in the past we didn't have a machine-actionable
way to distinguish between those two "things": the book and the
record. Each MARC record got an identifier, which identified the record. We've
never had identifiers for the thing the record describes (although the ISBN
sometimes works this way). It has always been safe to assume that the record
was about the book, and what identified the book was the information in the record.
So we obviously have a real world object, but we didn't give it its own
identifier - because humans could read the text of the record and understand
what it meant (most of the time or some of the time).
I'm not fully convinced that everything can be reduced to RWO/not-RWO, and so
I'm not buying that is the only way to talk about our world and our data. It
should be relatively easy, though, without getting into grand philosophical
debates, to determine the difference between our metadata and the thing it
describes. That "thing it describes" can be fuzzy in terms of the
real world, such as when the spirit of Edgar Cayce speaks through a medium and
writes a book. I don't want to have to discuss whether the spirit of Edgar
Cayce is real or not. We can just say that "whoever authors the book is as
real as it gets." So if we forget RWO in the RDF sense and just look
sensibly at our data, I'm sure we can come to a practical agreement that allows
both the metadata and the real world object to exist.
That doesn't resolve the problem of identifiers, however, and for
machine-processing purposes we do need separate identifiers for our
descriptions and what we are describing.* That's the problem we need to solve,
and while we may go back and forth a bit on the best solution, the problem is
tractable without resorting to philosophical confabulations.
* I think that the multi-level bibliographic descriptions like FRBR and
BIBFRAME make this a bit more complex, but I haven't finished thinking about
that, so will return if I have a clearer idea.
-- Karen Coyle[log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.netm: +1-510-435-8234skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600