Means of indirection in the identification metadata

[<list.mu@c-moria.com>]

Dear list members,

 

I am searching for some advice for using indirection in identification metadata

 

I generally like the approach as taken for FRBRauthor

The semantics of the author role has an indirection allowing me to be very precise

 

<FRBRauthor href="" as="#author"/>

and

<TLCRole eId="author" href=""> "https://my.ontology.com/vocabulary/author#author" showAs="Author"/>

 

I would love the same indirection (allowing me to be very precise) on other metadata too

 

1. Languages

I have my own language scheme since I need to express documents in Old Dutch for instance

I have some languages that sit outside the scope of ISO 639-2 alpha-3

 

I saw that the EU proposes a technique for doing so as expressed in AKN4EU modelling guidelines

 

<FRBRlanguage language="od"/>

 

<TLCReference name="language" href="">ld_dutch" showAs="od"/>

 

mandating the @showAs to have the same value as the @language attribute in the FRBRlanguage and mandating the @name to be 'language'

 

That would work for me. Though I wonder if that is a common practice

and I also wonder how that would work with @fromLanguage in a FRBRtranslation

 

Looking for guidance here, either confirmation that AKN4EU is using a best practice, or proposing some alternatives

(I must admit I am not too thrilled about the explicit mandate of using ISO 639-2 alpha-3)

 

2. Format

Same (sort of) applies to FRBRformat

I see everybody seems to use

<FRBRformat value="xml"/>

which makes kind of sense.

However, I want to be more precise (I do have multiple XML variant manifestations)

Again, some indirection would help

 

<FRBRformat value="xml"/>

and

<TLCReference name="format" href="" showAs="xml"/>

Is that a common way to do so? Are there better alternatives?

 

3. Dates

<FRBRdate date="1967-05-08" name="onto:birthday"/>

 

I want to indicate to the user what the semantics are for onto:birthday

I could do so by adding an XML namespace binding “onto” to the ontology namespace

So implicitly I am clear enough about how the onto:birthday should be understood

(assuming the user that wants to know, expands the value of @name into a full qualified name and check the expanded uri to the ontology,

I would have https://my.ontology.com/vocabulary/date/birthday dereferenced for information

 

xmlns:>

<FRBRdate date="1967-05-08" name="onto:birthday"/>

 

In case I want to be more precise and not assume the xml namespace binding would be used for uri expansion…

 

<TLCReference name="date" href="" showAs="onto:birthday"/>

 

Would that then be an acceptable way of expressing that semantics better?

 

Very happy to hear your views,

Thanks in advance

 

Geert Bormans, C-Moria