The bigger the quake, the more the aftershocks. Supposedly, a magnitude 9 quake will spawn (roughly) an 8, ten 7s, one hundred 6s, and so forth. If you want to calibrate your seismic senses, you couldn’t do better than to be in central Japan at this moment in time. I won a beer on a bet recently, about the intensity of one of the aftershocks, so I'm feeling a little smug.
In the process I’ve studied up on seismic rating systems (if you can call perusing Wikipedia ‘studying up’). Did you know the Richter scale is obsolete? I didn't. Its successor, the magnitude moment scale, doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but is supposedly a better metric for overall magnitude. Then there is the Japanese Meteorological Agency's seismic magnitude scale - shindo.
Shindo is geographically contextual (the same quake feels different 10 miles and 100 miles from the epicenter), but more importantly, its written from a human perspective. Check out the rating from the perspective of people for a 5(-): Most people try to escape from a danger. Some people find it difficult to move. Having jumped out of my first floor window recently, this is a scale I can relate to. Shindo descibes the characteristics of various levels of tremor on the observable surroundings of humans, rather than simply as a metric of energy released. A human understands being awakened by temblors and books flying off the shelf better than a logarithmic scale where an increase of 1 point means a factor of 30 more energy released, 2 points a factor of 1000. So what does this have to do with conceptual models and bibliography, you ask?
I’ve recently (re-)read Allison Carlisle’s Understanding FRBR as a Conceptual Model. It is quite a good introduction to every librarian’s favorite abstraction. It affords a good context to understand the trajectory of cataloging over the past century, and talks about the virtues of models in general (and how to evaluate them). The salient point (at least with respect to the shaky connection between seismology and bibliography) is that accuracy of the model is not necessarily the best predictor of usefulness. An accurate model may be defeated by its complexity as compared to a less accurate, simpler approximation, that is more easily applied to achieve the task at hand.
The FRBR model has probably had a greater impact on thinking about bibliography than any single abstraction... maybe ever. Almost 20 years after deliberations began, it still organizes our discussions, and it's latest sphere of influence is the domain of linked data and bibliography. The W3C Library Linked Data incubator group occasionally suffers mailstorms about small issues that have large implications for what bibliography looks like and how it will change as the web rewrites our perspectives. FRBR is often part of these discussions.
The latest bit torrent is about name authority data, and how it should be represented in the irregular matrix of RDF, SKOS, and OWL, the enabling technologies for semantics on the web. I won’t characterize the discussion (mostly because I can’t do it in a paragraph or two), but 42 messages, most substantive, in little more than a day, is a serious intellectual bun fight. Always nibbling at the edges of such discussions is the perenial question of whether we are trying to model bibliography or reality (and where the line is). The former is arguably (if barely) tractable, the latter is the purview of a 7,000 year discourse in the realm of philosophy.
The aggregate results of such discussions will determine in part how librarianship survives on the web... whether librarians can bring data and structures into focus in ways that solve the information seeking problems of users on the web. Success will depend in no small way on modeling information at the right level of abstraction.... matched to solving the problems, rather than modeling reality. I don't know exactly what that level should be, but I do I think I feel a tremor in there somewhere.
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The cherry blossoms (sakura) were perfect on Wednesday, and the campus of the National Agriculture Research Center in Tsukuba is a wonderful place to be overwhelmed by clouds of these delicate pink blossoms. Here, with a field of rapeseed in full blossom. Many thanks to Shigeo and Mitsuharu who provided tours to their grateful visitors on this peak day for viewing.
