[libdb-develop] Re: couple things (character, roles, and the FRBR)

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

>Morbus, while I got your announcement, it seems I'm having stuff bounce
>back from the sourceforge lists (cc-ing here).  A message I sent to the

Hmm. Do you have the bounce message still?

>Also, a question: why a separate "character" table?  Are not
>characters (virtual) people with perhaps a different role?

They are, but things get muddled a bit more when you consider that
characters can be based off real people. If I have "Morbus Iff" as
a real life person, and then you play me in a movie, there'd also
be a "Morbus Iff" character. I fear the confusion that can arise:
which of these (now) two "person" entries are the character, and
which is the real person?

This can be solved by adding a new column like "isCharacter", but
then we run into issues (?) of database cleanliness: very rarely
do characters in a movie (or even a book) have dates for when
they were born and died - all those fields would go empty,
resulting in a table that is only half being used.

I also worried about it from a table length point of view: a
million records in one table will certainly slow down queries,
and merging characters into persons could easily create 50+
rows for *one* movie in *one* table. I dunno. Seemed like
the inevitable "redesign the schema" event would come a lot
sooner with something like that.

As for the whole "role" thing and characters,
I'm basing it on inference, really:

 * if movie has character entry...
 * and character has person entry...
 * then person "has role Cast" of movie.

A similar relationship can be made from book author to character, though
"Cast" wouldn't be the right term. I've not thought of what term it would
be, solely because a) I've found no source for raw metadata about
characters in a book, b) the current goals focus on movies, c) I don't
think anyone, at this point in the game, is going to be too concerned with
modeling characters in a book.

>On the first, have you looked at the marc relator list?  It's quite
>extensive, and covers most of what I need (though is missing a few

I don't recall that one - link?

>I'm big on annotation (my own) myself, but don't you
>need a way to track *who* is doing the annotating?

Yup, this is possible in the current database. Annotations have
referers (the entity doing the annotation) and referents (the
entity receiving the annotation). So, in the current sample
data, we've got these relationships:

 * the DVD manifestation has summary of the movie expression.
 * the DVD manifestation has tagline of the movie expression.
 * the DVD manifestation has chapters of the movie expression.
 * the person "Morbus Iff" has reviewed the movie expression.

Likewise, you could add:

 * the person "Bruce D'Arcus" has noted the DVD manifestation.
 * the person "Bruce D'Arcus" left testimonial of the person "Morbus Iff".

And so and so forth. The referer/referent ideals are used throughout the
entire database schema, to support the idea that every row of every table
should be able to relate, somehow, to every other row of every other table.

><work ID="one">

This seems good to me, yes.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( small pieces of morbus loosely joined )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
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