Internet Alchemy

Over on the FRBR blog, William Denton had produced a FRBR-ised version of that fine literary work Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. At last a FRBR example that I can identify with! It’s quite a detailed example and I thought I’d have a go at representing it in RDF using the FRBR schema Richard and I developed last year.

Some points to note in my interpretation:

• I chose to use a mixture of successorOf and successor to describe the relationship of the book to others in the series. For consistency I perhaps could have described each work individually and just used the successor property. This would be closer to the pattern suggested by Dan Connolly. However, I wanted to show the RDF data in approximately the same order as William’s original example, so having the inverse properties helped with clarity.
• I chose to make the audio versions expressions of the work although the placement of them in the original example implied that they were related to the written expression. This kind of thing is still the subject of debate in FRBR circles. Perhaps I could have related them to the written expression like the translations, but I’m not entirely sure which FRBR relationship to use, perhaps transformation?
• In keeping with the usual FRBR practice I made the movie and game versions of the book separate works since they involve new creative input.

When reading this, it’s helpful to have the original example open in another window.

@prefix frbr: <http://vocab.org/frbr/core#> .
@prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> .
@prefix dct: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .

_:hpgf
  a frbr:Work ;
  dc:title "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"@en ;
  dct:abstract """Fourteen-year-old Harry Potter joins the Weasleys at the
    Quidditch World Cup, then enters his fourth year at Hogwarts Academy
    where he is mysteriously entered in an unusual contest that challenges
    his wizarding skills, friendships and character, amid signs that an old
    enemy is growing stronger."""@en ;

  frbr:creator _:jk ;

  frbr:successorOf [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"@en ;
    frbr:creator _:jk ;
    frbr:successorOf [
      a frbr:Work ;
      dc:title "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets"@en ;
      frbr:creator _:jk ;
      frbr:successorOf [
        a frbr:Work ;
        dc:title "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"@en ;
        frbr:creator _:jk ;
      ]
    ]
  ] ;

  frbr:successor [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"@en ;
    frbr:creator _:jk ;
    frbr:successor [
      a frbr:Work ;
      dc:title "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"@en ;
      frbr:creator _:jk ;
      frbr:successor [
        a frbr:Work ;
        rdfs:label "Untitled seventh volume"@en ;
        frbr:creator _:jk ;

      ]
    ]
  ] ;

  frbr:adaption [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"@en ;
    rdfs:label "The movie version" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:adaption [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"@en ;
    rdfs:label "The game version" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:realization [
    a frbr:Expression ;
    rdfs:label "Original text" ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Bloomsbury (UK) hardcover" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Bloomsbury (UK) paperback" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Bloomsbury (UK) paperback (adult cover)" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Scholastic (US) hardcover" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Raincoast (Canada) hardcover" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Raincoast (Canada) paperback" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Penguin (Canada) paperback (adult cover)" ;
    ] ;

    frbr:translation [
      a frbr:Expression ;
      rdfs:label "Arabic translation" ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Hardcover" ;
      ] ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Softcover" ;
      ] ;
    ] ;

    frbr:translation [
      a frbr:Expression ;
      rdfs:label "Finnish translation" ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Hardcover" ;
      ] ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Softcover" ;
      ] ;
    ] ;

    frbr:translation [
      a frbr:Expression ;
      rdfs:label "Italian translation" ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Hardcover" ;
      ] ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Softcover" ;
      ] ;
    ] ;

    frbr:translation [
      a frbr:Expression ;
      rdfs:label "Spanish translation" ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Hardcover" ;
      ] ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Softcover" ;
      ] ;
    ] ;

    frbr:translation [
      a frbr:Expression ;
      rdfs:label "Wolof translation" ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Hardcover" ;
      ] ;
      frbr:embodiment [
        a frbr:Manifestation ;
        rdfs:label "Softcover" ;
      ]
    ]
  ] ;

  frbr:realization [
    a frbr:Expression ;
    rdfs:label "Jim Dale's unabridged reading" ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Listening Libary: 17 CDs" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "Listening Libary: 12 cassettes" ;
    ] ;
  ] ;

  frbr:realization [
    a frbr:Expression ;
    rdfs:label "Stephen Fry's unabridged reading" ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "BBC Audiobooks: 18 CDs" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:embodiment [
      a frbr:Manifestation ;
      rdfs:label "BBC Audiobooks: 14 cassettes" ;
    ] ;
  ] ;

  frbr:subject [
    a frbr:Subject ;
    rdfs:label "Wizards -- Fiction" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:subject [
    a frbr:Subject ;
    rdfs:label "Magic -- Fiction" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:subject [
    a frbr:Subject ;
    rdfs:label "Schools -- Fiction" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:subject [
    a frbr:Subject ;
    rdfs:label "Harry Potter -- Fictional character" ;
  ] ;

  frbr:relatedEndeavour [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Quidditch Through the Ages"@en ;
    frbr:creator [
      a foaf:Person ;
      foaf:name "Kennilworthy Whisp" ;
    ] ;
  ] ;

  frbr:relatedEndeavour [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them"@en ;
    frbr:creator [
      a foaf:Person ;
      foaf:name "Newt Scamander" ;
    ] ;
  ] ;

  frbr:relatedEndeavour [
    a frbr:Work ;
    dc:title "The Sorcerer's Companion: A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter"@en ;
    frbr:creator [
      a foaf:Person ;
      foaf:name "Allan Zola Kronzek" ;
    ] ;
    frbr:creator [
      a foaf:Person ;
      foaf:name "Elizabeth Kronzek" ;
    ] ;
  ]
.

_:jk
  a foaf:Person ;
  foaf:name “J.K. Rowling” ;

Some recent discussion on the W3C’s RDF-in-XHTML list has got me thinking about how to enhance Embedded RDF to enable copy-and-paste metadata. Being able to copy some markup from one document to another is a key requirement of the RDF-in-XHTML taskforce. One strong use case is for embedded Creative Commons licences. Here the Creative Commons people would like to be able to generate a snippet of XHTML to be copied into the user’s document without them having to change markup in multiple places. Currently eRDF requires at least three changes to the XHTML document to enable the embedding:

1. Addition of profile attribute on head
2. Schema prefix declarations in head
3. Embedded markup in body

I think there’s a small change that could be made to the eRDF parsing rules to eliminate number two on that list. Currently schema prefixes are declared in link tags in the head of the document:

<link rel="schema.foaf" href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" />

My idea is to relax the constraint that the schema declaration must be in a link tag and allow it to appear anywhere in the document for any element that has a rel attribute. So this would allow:

<a rel="schema.foaf" href="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" />foaf</a>

The current specification already allows duplicate schema prefixes to be declared:

The order in which the schemas are declared is not significant. Where two identical schema prefixes are declared the first takes precedence. Any subsequent declarations are ignored.

It would require the prefix name “schema” to be reserved throughout the document but I don’t think that would cause any serious problems.

With this change it would be possible to write licence links like this:

<div>
  This work is licensed under a
  <a href="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
     rel="schema.cc">Creative Commons</a>
  <a rel="license cc-license"
     href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/">
     Attribution 2.0 England & Wales License
  </a>
</div>

Thoughts and comments welcome as always.