Dublin Core announces openWEMI for community review

openWEMI is an RDF vocabulary based on the concepts of Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item (WEMI) that were first introduced in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) document produced by a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). That work and subsequent versions form the theoretical basis for library catalog metadata.

This DCMI work product defines a minimally constrained set of classes and properties that can be used in a variety of contexts. Unlike the IFLA work, openWEMI elements are purposely defined without reference to library catalog functions. Because the openWEMI elements are defined broadly and with minimal constraints, metadata models are likely to use openWEMI elements as superclasses and super-properties to the more specific resource types being defined.

The proposal includes the class Endeavor, which is the superclass to the WEMI classes; this provides a semantic grouping of the WEMI entities. openWEMI also includes properties (commonWork, commonExpression, commonManifestation, commonItem) that can be used to make statements about any resources defined in metadata, even those not organized around WEMI concepts.

The openWEMI primer ¹ introduces the vocabulary and its uses. The RDF vocabulary has human-readable documentation ² and a downloadable turtle file ³. Note that the vocabulary uses a temporary namespace pending review and comments.

Comments, suggestions, and corrections can be addressed as github issues ⁴ or on the openWEMI mailing list ⁵.