I don't have FRBRoo in front of me right now, but i remember that it had some sort of category for what i would dub a "thought work", that is, the point at which a work is conceived but not yet manifested in any real world way. THough i think as a theoretical entity it belongs in the scheme, i have a hard time imagining its practical value, at least in bibliographical terms.
greta de groat Stanford University Libraries ----- Original Message ----- From: "Weinheimer Jim" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, December 22, 2008 12:20:50 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific Subject: Re: [RDA-L] FRBR, RDA ... and transcendental idealism Irvin Flack wrote: > I was thinking about this in relation to Mozart the other day. Assume, > according to the legend, he worked out his musical compositions in his > head completely before writing them down. For cataloguing purposes the > work doesn't exist until it's in a form that can be perceived by someone > else, even if he had the rest of the Requiem 'written' in his head. (Cf > the old 'sound of falling tree in a forest' riddle.) A excellent point. In RDF terms, there must be a some kind of shared agreement and understanding for the concept URI to exist in the first place. This is more difficult than you might think and I can offer an example. I remember at one organization I worked at when we had people from China to work on a multi-lingual thesaurus and the difficulties they encountered. One was the term "obesity," a concept that does not exist in Chinese, and apparently is culturally-based. On the other hand, it turns out that the concept of "obesity" is politically charged in some countries and can cause a lot of anger. I am sure others would have their own examples as well. Jim Weinheimer
