[libdb-develop] Movies, Casting, and Characters?

[Morbus I. <mo...@di...>]

[Note, this is a copy of a message I've sent to an FRBR mailing list.
I'll copy any relevant replies back to this mailing list for archival.]


Good day all. I'm a new subscriber, working on an as-yet-unannounced open 
source project based on FRBR. I'm new to FRBR, and I've some questions 
concerning your feelings, thoughts, and (possibly) in-use techniques.

I want to FRBRize movies, where carrier doesn't matter. The amount
of data I'd like to catalog is analogous to the IMDB: as much as
possible, with a minimal of five (top-billed or not) cast members
of the movie.

----
Question: what do you call a "movie"? To say I want to "index movies"
immediately restricts me to merely movies - it leaves out documentaries,
television series, cartoons, broadcasts of events (the Oscar's, etc.).
Similarly, "film" is not perfect, because you have "digital video"
elements that have never seen celluloid at all. "Video", perhaps,
is the most applicable, though it seems to give off a taint of
the ancients: "video is dead, long live DVDs". So, what do you
collectively call movies, documentaries, cartoons, and TV shows?

----
Question: is anyone actually indexing movies? Is anyone then
providing that data for public use? My initial reason for joining
the list was to scour the archives for answers, but the helpful
moderators/owners pointed me to the following document concerning
the ECHO Metadata implementation:

  http://pc-erato2.iei.pi.cnr.it/echo/public/
  deliv/D3-1-1%20ECHO%20Metadata%20Modelling.pdf

where it breaks down (loosely transcribed from p13):

  W: 2001: A space odyssey
   E1: The film "2001: A space odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick
    M1: The 35 mm format
    M2: The DVD from Paramount (or wherever).
     I1: The one I own, located in box 17.

Should expressions always contain the director? Should
"the film" be replaced with "the tv series", "the documentary",
"the cartoon", etc.?

----
Question: is anyone, movie or not, cataloging Character, which
presumably have the same information as a Person? If you are, how
are you distinguishing Corporate Body's from fictional bodies? How
are you distinguishing a Person who is playing a Character that
is based on a real Person? I'd love to be able to say "show me
all the items I have that haveCharacter Sherlock Holmes".

For now, that's it. Don't want to overstay my welcome with a 15k email. ;)

-- 
Morbus Iff ( i put the demon back in codemonkey )
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
Spidering Hacks: http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596005776/disobeycom
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus