OpenFRBR
William Denton announces OpenFRBR, a new Ruby-on-Rails application based on FRBR. This could be quite interesting, bringing the principles of FRBR to Web 2.0.
I suspect it’ll be quite a challenge, however, to achieve his charge that “Everyone FRARize everything.” This is not just a data modeling challenge (handling parts like book chapters and journal articles is going to be hard), but also for the GUI. Normal people (you know, non-librarians) will consider terms like “manifestation” and “expression” hopelessly abstract, even if one can identify more natural counterparts like “version” and “format.” A good user-focused application of FRBR, I think, must be an exercise in translation.
Also, the main site page promises a standard format for other systems to use.
If I may be so bold, I’d avoid using existing library standards to represent this sort of metadata, which will be both needlessly complicated, and frustratingly limited. As I’ve mentioned before, RDF is perfectly suited to this sort of use case, particularly given there is already a very good representation of FRBR.
Might be nice too to think of some kind of integration with Zotero.
