Description levels: A worked example

From the TC 372 Workshop Compendium

Description levels do not only offer new ways for user interaction with filmographic databases, but can also ecenomise the production of metadata.

<mediaplayer image='http://filmstandards.org/media/prossimamente2.jpg'>http://filmstandards.org/media/vitelloni-trailer-it.flv</mediaplayer>

This short piece is a trailer. A trailer is usually regarded as a work in its own right, rather than a version or variant of the work which it advertises. This trailer just serves to give us an idea of the work that will be discussed in the following.

This is from the EN 15907 definition of cinematographic work. The idea here is to have a description level for all statements that remain unchanged for all variants and manifestations of the work. Note that this definition is different from the FRBR concept of work, which abstracts from any particular embodiment. Since any moving image work is created by realising it in some moving image medium, it does not fit the FRBR definition of work.

An elementary work-level description would comprise the elements from EN 15744 minus those that do not belong to the work level in EN 15907. The figure on the left gives an idea of what a minimum work-level description could look like. Here is the XML record, the transformation script, and the resulting HTML page.

This is an equivalent of a work-level record from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. In library cataloguing, such records define a uniform title to be used in describing manifestations that may have been published with a different title (e.g. translations of the work). Note that the French title is given here as Les Vitelloni, which differs from most other French sources.

Very often, an elementary description of a film work also contains some basic information about the initial release, usually referred to as the "original" version. In EN 15907, this kind of information falls into the manifestation level.

EN 15907 allows manifestations to be directly associated with a cinematographic work, or via a variant level. Anticipating that we may want to distinguish between variants of this film work, we can insert a default Variant entity and associate our manifestation(s) with this. Here is the XML record, the transformation script, and the resulting HTML page.

Finally, we may wish to include information about a copy as an instance of the manifestation. This is what the Cineteca Nazionale publishes about their circulation copy of I Vitelloni. And here is what we can make of this information (including some educated guesses) in an EN 15907 metadata representation.

References and Materials: I Vitelloni Record for circulation copy at Cineteca Nazionale Record from the British Film Institute's SIFT database Record from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com) Record from filmweb.pl, a Polish syndication of IMDb MARC record for a Spanish DVD edition from BNE ISBD record for a French video edition from ABES/SUDOC Record from dbpedia: RDF rendered as HTML table French commission de classification record from CNC Copy of Italian home video edition in a German library Dutch distributor and and rating event from Cinema Context Essay by Tom Piazza published on the Criterion website U.S. DVD edition in the Criterion sales catalogue Copies of U.S. DVD edition in a union catalogue of German libraries Rating certificate for a German DVD edition U.K. DVD edition in a mail order catalogue TV broadcasts in the U.K. from the BFI database U.S. box office revenues from IMDb.com Posters and DVD covers from filmweb.pl Undated German re-release poster