ALEG

This document looks at breaking down some of the large entities described in the data model inventory with more specific descriptions. For example, the work entity covers all types of works, from periodicals to poems to reviews.

The point of this exercise to to resolve issues which get raised when we try to look deeper at what the things we are storing really are - what they consist of and how they interract with other elements. It does not imply a 'physical' implementation strategy, but hopefully progresses us along that path with more confidence.

Work/Expression/Manifestation

The Work/Expression/Manifestation entities are used in ALEG to record information about the intellectual and artistic output of agents. The workType attribute of a work classifies the work and its resulting expression and manifestation. The attributes and relationships of all these entities are determined by the workType.

Periodical

A Periodical work contains information about a periodical title, eg Westerly.

Periodical adds the following attributes to those of work:

• ISSN

  The ISSN of the periodical.

Notes and Issues:

• The ISSN of a periodical cannot change. If the ISSN changes, then we create a new work, linked to the old work with a 'successor/predecessor' relationship.

• A periodical can only have one ISSN. The FRBR model has the ISSN stored at the manifestation level, but does a periodical actually have a manifestation? I don't think so - in our interpretation of the FRBR, a periodical is related to periodicalIssues, which do have expressions and manifestations. Rather than store the ISSN at the manifestation level of the periodicalIssue, why not store it at the work level of a periodical?

• Periodicals may be related to other periodicals via influenced and previouslyKnownAs relationships For example, if periodical X changed its name to Y then the two would be linked by a previouslyKnownAs relationship.

• Periodicals are linked to their individual issues (see PeriodicalIssue below).

• Periodicals are never expressed - only their periodicalIssue's are expressed

• However, periodicals may be associated with a URL which points to the 'home page' of the periodical

• The periodical may have creators associated with it, such as an editor. However, as supported by the general relationship model, editors will come and go and so the editorOf (or will it be editedBy?) relationship must have a temporal scope (ie, date range) recorded in the relationship (are there other types of scopes? For example (and this is a more general question), could a periodical concurrently have many editors specialising in aspects of the publication along geographic or genre "scopes"? If so, is this more effectively dealt with in as a note to the relationship, or by some formal means (as is being proposed with temporal scope) to explicily record the scope in the relationship, mapped to a topic?
  MLA, TW: The latter.

• Is a newspaper considered to be a periodical, eg "The Canberra Times"? Do newspapers have ISSN's?
  Yes

• AUSTLIT currently records as a source many variants on "The Canberra Times" and other newspapers such as:
  • The Canberra Times
  • The Canberra Times. 1960
  • The Canberra Times. 1961
  • The Canberra Times (Curtain Up Canberra Playhouse). 1998
  • The Canberra Times (Good Times). 1990
  • The Canberra Times Sunday Times (Fun & Games). 1997
  • The Canberra Times (ANU Reporter). 1996
  • The Canberra Times (Souvenir Edition). 1997
  • The Canberra Times (The Guide). 1998

  Most of these titles represent several issues, but some (such as the Souvenir Edition) don't. How should we handle this information about part of a periodical (the TV guide, the children's liftout, etc)? Maybe as:

  1. A separate periodical, linked to the newspaper by some type of 'partOf' relationship?
  2. A separate issue, identified with a title in the periodicalIssue record?
  3. A separate issue, identified with a new periodicalIssue specific field designed explicitly for this purpose?
  4. not at all - the information about where/in-what-section in an issue another work appeared is recorded in the manifestation information for the work - ie, as well as recording the page number, a note is made "in the Good Times section"?

  MLA, TW: The final option is not acceptable. Need to choose option 1 or 3, probably both options available and used at the indexer's discretion.

PeriodicalIssue

A PeriodicalIssue work/expression/manifestation contains information about a specific issue of a periodical.

PeriodicalIssue adds the following attributes to those of work:

• year
• volume
• number
• month/Season (issue description)

Notes and Issues

• A periodicalIssue is linked to its "parent" periodical via a "issueOf" relationship.

• A periodicalIssue will usually "inherit" agents from its parent, the periodical, by applying those agents active at the time of issue of the periodicalIssue. However, any periodicalIssue may have a specific set of agents which apply to that specific issue.

Sequence and Series

A sequence work just defines a sequence, which is just a name for a group of works related because they are part of the sequence. Notes and Issues

• A sequence is very much like a collection, except that the works comprising the sequence are very closely related.

• Is a sequence purely an abstract concept, or could a sequence be expressed and manifested (ie, be published)? If so, would it be published as a collection or as a sequence?
  MLA: Yes and Both.
  KF: If a sequence was actually published (that is, all the individual works in the sequence were published together), then I think an expression and manifestation would be created, "realising" the sequence work entity:

  

• A sequence can be ordered or unordered. An ordered sequence needs to record the order of its component works (unlike a collection?): part 1, part 2, etc

• A sequence can be assigned subject classifications not assigned to any of its parts. For example, a sequence on "Summer", "Autumn", "Winter", "Spring" may be assigned the subject "Seasons".

• A component of a sequence could be another sequence (i.e., nested sequences).

• Components of a sequence don't [MLA] necessarily inherit anything from the sequence. I.e., creators, subjects etc are also assigned to a sequence and its components independently.

Collection

A collection entity just defines a work which sets out to combine other works within a single new work. Collections are differentiated as "anthology" and "collected works" and "selected works", and probably "website".

MLA: Webiste? sure - eg the Dorothy Porter home page could be described as "Selected Works[electronic]"; OzLit could be "Anthology[electronic]"

Collection adds the following attributes to those of work:

• collectionType - one of "anthology", "collected works" and "selected works"

Notes and Issues

• ALEG (and AUSTLIT) records page information for manifestations of works forming the collection. However, because page information is manifestation related (and not related to the more abstract notion of work or expression) this information is defined in the relationship record which links the manifestation to the manifestation of the collection. Somewhat suprisingly, there is no need for a direct relationship between the expression of a collection and the expressions of its constituents.
  
  
  MLA: Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether we would give page numbers for all manifestations

  Hence, in the above diagram, the link between the two works and two expressions (shown as a dotted line) is not actually represented but is derived from the verse appearing in a particular manifestation of the collection. The relationship between the verse and the manifestation of the collection also records the page information.

• Some works in a collection may only appear in the collection and nowhere else.

• Some works may have a special relationship with the collection, eg, a foreword or introduction. These may change substantially between expressions of a collection. Does this call for another work type: "foreword" and/or "introduction", which gets linked to an expression or manifestation of a collected work with a partOf relationship? I wonder if this relationship is so special/different that the relationship should also annotate this is some way, eg: partOf (foreword). Perhaps relationships will be heavily sub-classed (or specialised) to neatly(?) represent relationship types...

  Note that 'single works' could also have separately identified (as works) forewords or introductions.

• A collection is independently indexed - it doesn't inherit anything from its components.

Agent

The Agent entity is used in ALEG to record information about humans and organisations which are:

• responsible for the intellectual or artistic content of works or expressions or the production of manifestations
• the subject of works
• influenced by or influences on works

This isn't a particularly significant dichotomy, but maybe it will help later provide templates or rules for the data maintenance of these entities. For example, the familial relationships of which an organisation could partake are pretty limited!

The organisation subclass is used for companies, government, agencies and all groupings of humans such as cultural groups (eg, the "Aranda" tribe).

Notes and Issues:

• Organisations have previous and subsequent names, can be known as various names at the same time and can have subordinate and superior entities (for example, see how CSIRO is treated in the Australian Science at Work site).

• Can organisations have pseudonyms?
  MLA: no - 'also known as'

• Is ALEG interested in recording the relationships creators have with organisations? Would ALEG record an organisation which was considered significant, eg, the DLP or Communist Party just so that some of these relationships could be represented (eg, famous author X memberof the Communist Party 1945-1952), or would this be done in some other way (such as making the "Communist Party" a topic (related to the "organisations" topic), and creating a relationship between the "famous author X" and the "Communist Party" topic of type: "memberOf")?
  MLA: Yes (maybe not at first - requires more data than we currently have)