Following the release of BIBFRAME 2.0 (BF2) in April 2016, the LD4 Ontology Group needed to assess the assessed changes to the ontology in order to understand implications for implementation in the LD4L Labs tooling and for the LD4P BIBFRAME Ontology Extensions. To do so, representatives underwent an assessment of BF2 that This assessment included review of every term in BF (approximately 180 classes and approximately 190 properties). Through this process, the group determined that composing narrative recommendations alongside OWL files implementing those recommendations would facilitate community feedback and influence the evolution of BIBFRAME. As such, the group extended BF2 created bibliotek-o, an ontology framework extending BF2 to handle broader aspects of bibliographic description and identified implementing alternative patterns for select areas of BF2. Work on
Reusing BIBFRAME as its core, bibliotek-o is not implementable without BIBFRAME; however, bibliotek-o occurred between April 2016 and December 2016, during which time the team engaged in extensive communication with the BIBFRAME architects, based at the Library of Congress.The 110 classes and properties recommended for change in reuses properties and classes from already established ontologies, in addition to minting its own terms where the developers determined a lack of adequate terms for reuse. The 110 recommended changes to BF2 are delineated in a a bibliotek-o to BIBFRAME Deviation CSV. In this document, we provide a concise reason alongside determination regarding whether the issue reflects a structural or non-structural change in BF2. Additionally, we composed eight documents discussing larger modeling patterns whereby we believed that BF2 could benefit from deeper analysis; these documents are summarized on the the bibliotek-o : an overview wiki wiki page.
While the bibliotek-o ontology is not intended for long-term usage or production-level implementation, we firmly believe that decisions as important as the widespread adoption of bibliographic data models should be community-driven based on extensive consideration and experimentation. bibliotek-o represents LD4's experimentation in this space. bibliotek-o was not designed as a competitor to BIBFRAME; by demonstrating extended and alternative patterns, we aimed to offer encourage community feedback on potential solutions to areas that the Ontology Group believed could benefit BIBFRAME modeling.
Work on bibliotek-o occurred between April 2016 and December 2016, during which time the team included a member of the LC Network Development and MARC Standards Office; further, the group engaged in extensive communication with the BIBFRAME architects, based at the Library of Congress, throughout the process. Since this time, Library of Congress introduced a GitHub repository to facilitate feedback to BF2; however, this was created more than a year following the conclusion of bibliotek-o development.
The process of developing bibliotek-o led to revisions to BF2. Notably, the Library of Congress defined OWL constraints in the ontology; minted a number of new properties, including the creation of inverses for existing properties; and minted new subclasses for existing BF2 classes. This work was presented at DCMI 2016 (Copenhagen, Denmark), DCMI 2017 (Crystal City, Va) and SWIB 2017 (Hamburg, Germany).
...
Presentations (included on LD4L Labs Communications and Outreach):
- 2016-10 - "Ontology Assessment and Extension: A Case Study on LD4L and BIBFRAME", Jason Kovari and Steven Folsom DCMI, October 2016
- 2017-04 - "Ontology Topic Area", Steven Folsom and Jason Kovari LD4P/LD4L Community Meeting, April 2017
- 2017-10-27 - "Towards a BIBFRAME Implementation: the bibliotek-o Framework", Steven Folsom, Jason Kovari, and Rebecca Younes. DCMI: International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (Washington, D.C.).
- 2017-12-05 - "The bibliotek-o Framework: Principles, Patterns, and a Process for Community Engagement" (video), Steven Folsom, Jason Kovari and Rebecca Younes. SWIB 2017, Hamburg, Germany