Towards an Ontology for Library Modalities
Christopher A. Welty · 1998
This paper focuses briefly on the work we have been doing in developing an ontology of modalities for libraries. This ontology is founded on a simple, yet profound, observation: many of the different entities within a library will be versions of the same thing. Some of these may simply be identical copies of the same book, journal, etc., but even in the present day the majority of these cases are different modalities of the same thing. The prototypical example was formulated in [Welty, 1994]. A paper in the library, which has attributes such as author, abstract, date, what it was published in, etc., may be available in several formats, such as HTML, Postscript, PDF, etc. The key here is that the postscript file, the HTML file, and the PDF file, are all the same paper. They have the same author, abstract, etc., yet there are attributes of the different formats that are distinct, and are meaningful in the role of those files as different views of the paper. Obviously each has a different location in the filesystem, in addition the HTML file may have an html-version attribute, the postscript file may have a "translated by" attribute, etc. Finally, the paper may well exist in paper form as well, and this is merely another view of the paper. The paper form would have attributes like location (such as it's library catalog number - perhaps inherited from the book or journal the paper was published in. This has important implications for the card catalog system. Many views of the same document can be stored in the catalog without requiring different entries. A search for the paper will have a single result, and then give the user the option of "delivery formats". In fact, part of the AXIOM project includes research into a query language that will allow users to construct new ...