Enhancing Expressiveness of Conceptual Modeling for Bibliographic Relationships - A Reflection on the FRBR Entity-Relationship Model -

The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) is a `conceptual model of the bibliographic universe` developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). Although some studies have suggested improvements in FRBR, and others explore alternative approaches, less attention has been paid to analyzing the internal coherence and consistency of the FRBR view as presented not only in the FRBR entity-relationship model and text of the FRBR document, but also in the related explanations and presentations of FRBR expositors. Our investigations have noted some interesting discrepancies between the general FRBR approach as presented in various expository documents and the specific account presented in the FRBR ER model and the FRBR document. We see that in one case these discrepancies can be easily remedied by adding additional modeling constructs and assertions, but in another case (the supposed `inheritance` of attributes across the Group 1 entities), there is a substantial difficulty in maintaining a consistent model. We discuss several alternative approaches to enhancing the expressiveness of FRBR in order remedy this problem. We note that none is entirely satisfactory.