Modeling Bibliographic Data in RDF (round 2)
Hamish continues with round 2 of his RDF experiment, and offers these comments. I’ll respond now before things get crazy next week.
I am unconvinced by the collation of publisher and place. I think this is an artefact of how information is used in citation, rather than a reflection of the structure of reality (whatever that it …) (are the address of a publisher and the place where a speech delivered structurally similar in terms of citation, even?).
The way I look at this issue is as follows:
originInfo represents the source of a given object: where it came from and when.
Strictly speaking, there is a difference between the place of a publisher and a place a speech was given, but that difference doesn’t strike me as particularly significant, at least not with respect to citation formatting.
Still, I have argued that MODS needs some notion of an “event,” as distinct from a physical object. It could be useful, then, to distinguish an event place (where something happened) from a publisher place (where a published object came from).
On parts numbers:
Those starts and ends still need to be generalised. I wonder if anyone has done any work on a “parts of things” vocabulary?
MODS distinguishes between “detail” and “extent” (what Hamish wants to call “range” but is slightly broader I think). The latter can contain “start,” “end,” and “list” elements. Somewhat strangely, it uses a “type” attribute on the first and a “unit” attribute (which sounds better to me) on the second to indicate the same thing:volumes, issues, pages, etc. Our DocBook citation proposal drew on this as well, using “unit” and “start” and “end” attributes.
I definitely have some time for the idea of an event with a place. I’ll think about that. One possible complication: the publication of a published object is presumably an event as well, so events and publishers could usefully coexist.
The reason for noting the difference between place of publication and place of an event happening is not because there is anything different about the notions of place, but because with publishers I’d prefer to see the place as a property of the publisher, and the same publisher resource referred to from each item published by them.
_:publishedItem biblio:publisher _:pub1 . _:pub1 biblio:place “Whatever” .
Do you have any pointers to examples of the use of “detail” and “extent”? I can’t see “detail” in the MODS guidelines, and “extent” doesn’t seem very well specified. The only example shown is one which says <extent>15 p.</extent>.
Do you have a URI for details of the DocBook citation proposal, too?
Do keep working on the structural relations in citation page; it is already quite thought provoking and can only get better!