Issue 305: Actor Appellation

Posted by Steve 2/8/2016
The scope note and examples of E82 Actor Appellation do not clearly convey the idea that the appellation must be of a form that is characteristically an appellation of an actor. This is causing confusion in the user community.
One alternative is to retire E82 altogether and the other is to update the scope note.
I would vote for deprecation/retirement.

I have also suggested a new scope note and changed examples:-
E82 Actor Appellation
Subclass of:         E41 Appellation

Scope note:        This class comprises any sort of name, number, code or symbol characteristically used to identify an E39 Actor.

An E39 Actor will typically have more than one E82 Actor Appellation, and instances of E82 Actor Appellation in turn may have alternative representations. The distinction between corporate and personal names, which is particularly important in library applications, should be made by explicitly linking the E82 Actor Appellation to an instance of either E21 Person or E74 Group/E40 Legal Body. If this is not possible, the distinction can be made through the use of the P2 has type mechanism.
Examples:           
  “John Doe”
  “Doe, J”
  “the U.S. Social Security Number 246-14-2304”
  “the Artist Formerly Known as Prince”
  “the Master of the Flemish Madonna”
  “Raphael’s Workshop”
  “the Brontë Sisters”
  “ICOM”
  “International Council of Museums”

E82 Actor Appellation
Subclass of:         E41 Appellation

Scope note:        This class comprises any sort of name, number, code or symbol characteristically used to identify an E39 Actor. That is the very form of the name indicates that it is an appellation of an instance of E39 Actor.

An E39 Actor will typically have more than one E82 Actor Appellation, and instances of E82 Actor Appellation in turn may have alternative representations. The distinction between corporate and personal names, which is particularly important in library applications, should be made by explicitly linking the E82 Actor Appellation to an instance of either E21 Person or E74 Group/E40 Legal Body. If this is not possible, the distinction can be made through the use of the P2 has type mechanism.
Examples:           
   the U.S. Social Security Number “246-14-2304”
  UK Company Number “2374216”
  Leonardo da Vinci’s ULAN identifier “ULAN500010879”
Posted by Dominic 2/8/2016
I was under the impression from some time ago that this was going to be retired. An appellation of an actor entity is an actor appellation and doesnt need specialisation.
D

posted by Pat on 2/8/2016

It is problematic to distinguish an “Actor Appellation” from an Appellation in general. It entirely depends on cultural knowledge to see a given term as a plausible actor appellation or not. And such cultural norms change over time. Also with the inclusion in E82 of codes and numbers, the scope is very broad. And, even though a term may normally be viewed as an appropriate name for a person or corporate body, it may be used to name a thing (Apollo spacecraft) or a work (Emma). The function of the appellation is given by the appellation relationship, and not by any inherent characteristic of the form of the name or term.

posted by Christian Emil on 3/8/2016

The sub classes of appellation, e.g. actor appellation and place appelletion were introduced in crm around 2001-2002. At that time there was a view that there were special characteristica for place name and actor names which made it possible to detect and differenciate  between them. This has been proven to be a not correct assumption​.

In pre industrial societies, at least in Norway, the name and the "address" were mixed.

The subclasse tree of E41 is

E41 Appellation
E42 -
Identifier
E44 -
Place Appellation
E45 -
- Address
E46 -
- Section Definition
E47 -
- Spatial Coordinates
E48 -
- Place Name
E49 -
Time Appellation
E50 -
- Date
E75 -
Conceptual Object Appellation
E82 -
Actor Appellation
E51 -
Contact Point
E45 -
- Address
E35 -
Title

Do we really want to delete all but E35 Title, E45 Address and E47 Spatial Coordinates?

posted by Franco on 4/8/2016

Hi all CRMers.

A long email as usual. Some Latin required, if you are not familiar with it, wikipedia may help, links provided.

C-E’s statement below in my opinion shows his surprise (maybe disappointment?) about this “Cupio dissolvi” approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupio_dissolvi), of removing most of the subclasses of E41. If so, I fully agree with him.

My approach: establish rules and try to apply them. Gut feeling is not appropriate.

Quoting from FORTH’s presentation at CAA2016 "Methodological tips for mappings to CIDOC CRM” by Bruseker, Dakalaki, Doerr & Theodoridou:

"A class is not declared unless it is required as the domain or range of a property not appropriate to its superclass, or it is a key concept in the practical scope"

Too many negations. I would restate it as follows (not + not = yes):

(R) A class is declared if, and only if, either or both of the following applies:
(R1) it is required as the domain or range of a property inappropriate to its superclass, or
(R2) it is a key concept in the practical scope

Do we agree on that? I do.

In light of the above rule, let’s check the subclasses of E41. Below I state “Remain” if (R) applies, “Leave” if it does not and we can get rid of the subclass with no damage. It sounds sort of Brexit, let’s call it CRMxit

E42 Identifier - Remain. Reason: (R2), identifiers are an essential part of the game, otherwise what’s a PID? Uniqueness is also an (R1) reason.

E44 Place Appellation - Remain. Reason: mainly (R2) but also (R1). Killing it would kill also E48. Don’t destruct gazetteers. If you want to know more, see my forthcoming paper on the Pleiades mapping, draft available on request - but after I return from summer holidays. BTW I like quoting (and advertising) myself since usually nobody else does.

E45 Address - Neutral, but preferably Leave. Due to the many aspects an address may take, no uniqueness, semantic irrelevance. Qualification with E55 Type “Address” is enough. Who cares about addresses? Only the mailman. Not decidedly for Leave because Address is an everyday concept, somehow superseded by the possibility of receiving everywhere (nowhere) communications by email, SMS, whatsapp and the like. On the other hand, Address as a special case of place appellation is confusing.

E46 Section Definition - Uncertain, more towards Remain. Requires additional thought as in CRMarcheo and CRMba. If I remember well, used also in CRMsci.

E47 Spatial Coordinates - Remain. (R2), too important for CRMgeo to let it go. Also (R1) as they can be fed into further processing after they are identified by Type: long-lat, google maps, chess coordinates "Queen in a1 - checkmate"; (but what about “Bishop’s pawn ahead by two", the second move of a Queen’s gambit; it’s a diversion, forget it)

E48 Place Name - Remain, of course, see above comment about E44. Place names are the quintessence of spatial reasoning about old texts that did not use coordinates but just names, so (R1) + (R2).
Not relevant if places are named after people living there, as in ancient Norway and probably in ancient everywhere. Here in Italy there are many place names like “Case Passerini” near Florence, the current location of a waste treatment plant (the right location for future, 30th century archaeological investigations), which is clearly named after a Passerini family nobody knows about. Also, typical English use: “Let’s see at Martin’s for dinner” with the genitive (possessive) used as locative like in some cases in Latin.

E49 Time Appellation - Remain!!! Both for (R1) and (R2). How could archaeologists dispense with named periods? There are plenty of papers (including some of mine) dealing with time period name resolution. Killing E48 would destroy archaeological documentation, how could archaeologists writing papers without mentioning “Upper Eneolithic” or “Early Classic Cypriot IV".

E50 Date - Perhaps Remain but not strictly necessary, personally I would be for Leave. In my opinion it is a pseudo-concept. i would prefer to distinguish between time-stamp if precise to some granularity level (year/day/hour and minutes as in ISO8601), and a Time Appellation with type date if not. Is “Martin Doerr’s birth day” a date? according to the E50 scope note, it seems to be, in the CRM world at least. But practical, everyday use may suggest Remain.

E75 Conceptual Object Appellation - Uncertain, Revise. The scope note is unpleasant, it looks more an identifier than an appellation. "Pythagora’s theorem” is the name (= appellation) of the theorem everybody knows, but it is uncertain if it is an E75, probably not.

E82 Actor Appellation - Leave. Scope note unpleasant: "any sort of name, number, code or symbol characteristically used to identify an E39 Actor”. How do I know it is an E39 Actor, itself an imprecise (Bernini’s Fountain in Piazza di Spagna heavily damaged in 2015 by hooligan Feyenoord supporters, are these an E39? or only the temporary grouping of the unidentified ones who actually did it?) but unfortunately necessary concept? “Characteristically”? Come on...
Bye bye E82.

E51 Contact Point - Leave. Irrelevant, bureaucratic, pernickety, unnecessary, indeterminate. Is this an official job, like “What is your job at FORTH? I am an E51 contact point! Ah, great, you must earn a good salary for that”. Also Amazon believes I am franco.niccolucci@gmail.com for my family's purchases, and I started thinking the same (my cat does as well, she’s going to send emails when hungry). Resolved with Type, same as with other more important qualifications as director, curator etc or email, skype-nickname, etc.

E35 Title - Remain. Of course. An E41 Appellation (Leonardo’s Masterpiece) is not a Title (Mona Lisa), it is just an Appellation. However, there are two titles for this painting, one used in English (Mona Lisa) and one in Italian and French (La Gioconda, La Joconde), not translations of each other. This is not forbidden by the scope note, but perhaps stating that title uniqueness (beyond straight literal translation) is not implied, would clarify. This applies to other works as well, typically to movies sometimes weirdly re-titled by distributors in different countries. Since the scope note mentions that also the translation of a Title is a Title, adding that also the non-translation of a Title may be a Title would not hurt. Otherwise some people could think that “Mona Lisa” is “THE" title, while it is only “A" title. Don’t call it the English Title, classes cannot have qualificative adjuctoves.
By the way what is a “work”, the term used in the scope note of E35? Why not calling it an E71 Man-made Thing, as it is? One has to go through the scope note of P102 has title, to discover it. If “work" is defined elsewhere, call it properly by name, not generically.
This would re-open an old issue: is the Title,
(a) the Title of the material object (E24), identified by Louvre inventory no. 779 hanging on the wall in room 6 of first floor at Louvre named (titled?) La Salle de La Joconde; or
(b) the Title of the immaterial object (E28), of which the above-mentioned painting Louvre id 779 and on display at the Louvre, is the (one?) materialization; or
(c) both (a) and (b).

Easy (?) question for an ancient, unique painting, less easy for multiples - maybe before answering you may wish to read Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”. Without much thinking on it, I would go (gut-feelingly) for (b). But I am going off-topic, let’s keep this discussion for another time. Possible external references, e.g. to FRBR, should however be mentioned in the scope note.

Enough for you, the survivors of a SIG meeting; thanks to those who had the patience of reading up to here. For all, time for holidays now.

posted by Dominic Oldman on 4/8/2016

If an appellation is attached to an actor - isn't it an actor appellation. Likewise if an appellation is attached to a place then isn't it a place appellation?

orcid.org/0000-0002-5539-3126

posted by Dan on 4/8/2916

Hi friends,

Recall Fronco's:

(R) A class is declared if, and only if, either or both of the following applies:
(R1) it is required as the domain or range of a property inappropriate to its superclass, or
(R2) it is a key concept in the practical scope

1. I would regret the CRMExit of E82_Actor_Appellation !

Actually, in my application I have even a subtype: "Anthroponym". By virtue of R2. Not to mention that its values are rdf:XMLLiterals.
E.g.

"Pieter Bruegel [Breughel, Brueghel] the Elder, called Peasant Bruegel, also called Pieter the Droll"

Reason: I have to split it in segments, in order to be able to generate (refined) index entries and to display some segments in bold and
some segments in italics.

True not only for anthroponyms. Also for other actor appellations. E.g.

"United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland"

2. For the same reason (R2), I use a kind of (not subclass of – with dilemmas) E75_Conceptual_Object_Appellation: Term. E.g.

#woman[E55_Type]
   P1_is_Identified_by
      #woman@en[Term] rdfs:label<#singular> "woman"
      #woman@en[Term] rdfs:label<#plural> "women"

Note: several types could share the same term (e.g. "mass").

Sometimes, I use also XMLLiterals as values i.e. instead rdfs:label, I use has_Xml_Value. Why ? For cases like:

"la femme"/"les femmes", "effet Doppler-Fizeau".

Of course, I could use only E41_Appellation and differentiate them via .1 qualifiers. But... R2 !

posted by Franco on 6/8/2016

Martin,

Franco's rule may be restated as follows, still avoiding too many negations:

(R) A class MAY BE declared if, and only if, either or both of the following applies:
(R1) it is required as the domain or range of a property inappropriate to its superclass, or
(R2) it is a key concept in the practical scope

In my original formulation it seemed that creating a class was compulsory if those conditions were verified, what of course is not the case: as you say, there may be other reasons not to start the process of new class creation.

Further rule refinements/amendments welcome, together with a sister rule for properties, where the trick of Typization (i.e. using the superclass with P2 has type) has the limits we all know, i.e. generates a “dot” property (P999.1) that requires reification for proper RDF treatment.

Like! to most of your comments about Remain/Leave; still unsure about E48.

Ashes on my head (Repent!!) for confusing E49 Time Appellation and Period names, probably misled by same confusion in the head of some archaeologists who use these names to “date” something. So for them “Early bronze age” means the time span "3300 to 2700 BC”. In their mind, it is also an E4 Period and a “culture”, whatever the latter may mean.
Confusion, as wisely Gardin pointed out: but they are not guilty, CRM-wise, because according to the present E49 scope note it can be "all forms of names or codes, such as historical periods, and dates, which are characteristically used to refer to a specific E52 Time-Span”.