Error during command authentication.

“Roles” are relationships.  The role proposal seems implicitly to be scoped to agent relationships, what in RDA terms is Appendix I.  However, there are also relationships among resources, or Appendix J in RDA.  Does the role proposal affect resource relationships?  Or do current BIBFRAME properties such as bf:reproduction stay in place?

Joe Kiegel

A  few points on the role proposal.

One of the issues is whether we can say :

        bf:agent [bf:identifiedBy  <agent resource> ]

and Thomas Berger points out that “objects of bf:identifiedBy are of class bf:Identifier,” (implication being that bf:identifiedBy has range bf:Identifier)  so you can’t do that. 

However, as I noted in my previous message (Identifier proposal) it is still open to debate  whether bf:identifiedBy is merely a replacement for or generalization of  bf:identifier.  If the latter, then bf:identifiedBy would no longer have range bf:Identifier, and so the above would be allowed.

Along these lines is the question of whether we can further contract the above to (Karen’s example):

   bf:agent   <http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/1234> 

And again it depends on how/whether we define a range for bf:agent.  If we define the range to be class bf:Agent, then no, we cannot.  I think most of us are inclined not to want to restrict the vocabulary in this manner, and to allow such a contraction.

Steven Folsom notes that bf:contributor sounds like it’s an agent, when really it is a combination of a role and agent, and might be better named bf:contribution.   I like that suggestion.

However, it does present one limitation - the proposal does allow for this contraction:

      bf:contributor  <agent resource>

which could be useful when you want to say that an agent is a contributor, without specifying a role.

It would not make sense to say:

      bf:contribution  <agent resource>

because it sounds too much like an agent is a contribution.  However, perhaps we can live with this limitation.

So, changing contributor to contribution and repurposing contributor, we might say:

   bf:contribution

           [  bf:contributor  <agent resource> ;

              bf:role              <role resource> ]

and if no role is to be specified:

bf:contribution

           [  bf:contributor  <agent resource> ]

Ray Denenberg

Library of Congress