BIBFRAME 2.0 URIs and Guidelines

With the variety of systems and services available to librarians when creating descriptions of resources, this BIBFRAME guideline shows how the vocabulary can be used to express attributes of a resource, whether or not linked data friendly URIs are known and available. Below are 4 core (and likely) situations with techniques for handling them that are both mutually compatible and simple. The first three techniques can be efficiently queried with a single query.

Example used below to illustrate methods:

Many BIBRAME properties are used to express various characteristics of a resource. For example, the base material used for a publication (an Instance), is expressed by bf:baseMaterial, for which corresponding class bf:BaseMaterial is also defined.  Suppose the base material is paper.  Then the object of bf:baseMaterial would be  the concept “paper” and a URI identifying that concept would be supplied if available.

Method 1:  URI only provided

Suppose http://bibframe.example.org/baseMaterial/paper  identifies the concept “paper” .
If resource  http://bibframe.example.org/instance/instanceY  has base material of paper, this might be expressed simply as:

<http://bibframe.example.org/instance/instanceY> 
         bf:baseMaterial   <http://bibframe.example.org/baseMaterial/paper> .

Method 2:  URI plus label

If we want to supply a label in addition, this could be expressed as:

<http://bibframe.example.org/instance/instanceY> 
         bf:baseMaterial   <http://bibframe.example.org/baseMaterial/paper> . 

<http://bibframe.example.org/baseMaterial/paper> 
         a			bf:BaseMaterial ;
         rdfs:label		“paper”    .

Method 3:  No URI, label only known

Next, suppose there is no known URI for paper, we can just state (via label) that the base material is paper.

<http://bibframe.example.org/instance/instanceY>    bf:baseMaterial     [
         a		    	 bf:BaseMaterial ;
         rdfs:label		“paper”  ]  .

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