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While the FRBR hierarchy <strong>in</strong>cludes Works, Expressions, Manifestations, and Items, the CTS protocol
uses the terms Work, Edition, Translation, and Exemplar. As communicated by Porter et al. (2006),
CTS extends the FRBR hierarchy upward by “group<strong>in</strong>g Works under a notional entity called
“TextGroup,’” an entity that can refer to authors for literary texts or to corpora such as <strong>in</strong>scriptions
(e.g., “Berl<strong>in</strong>” for a published corpus of papyri). It also extends the FRBR hierarchy downward to
support the “identification and abstraction of citable chunks of text (Homer, Iliad Book 1, L<strong>in</strong>e 123), or
ranges of citable chunks (Hom.~ Il. 1.123-2.22).” This both downward and upward extension of FRBR
is important, for as Romanello (2008) underscores, “it allows one to reach a higher granularity when
access<strong>in</strong>g documents hierarchically and supports the use of a citation scheme referr<strong>in</strong>g to each level of
the entire document hierarchical structure.” Romanello notes that another important feature of CTS is
that it enables the differentiation of “different exemplars” of the same text.
As noted above, citations <strong>in</strong> CTS are expressed as CTS URNs. CTS URNs “provide the permanent
canonical references that Canonical Text Services (CTS) rely on <strong>in</strong> order to identify or retrieve
passages of text. These references are a k<strong>in</strong>d of Uniform Resource Name (URN).” 169 URNs, accord<strong>in</strong>g
to RFC2141 170 , “are <strong>in</strong>tended to serve as persistent, location-<strong>in</strong>dependent, resource identifiers.” Smith
(2009) provides extensive <strong>in</strong>formation on the syntax of CTS-URNs and their role <strong>in</strong> the CTS.
This same article also addressed the importance of standards such as CTS (Smith 2009). “Source
citation is just one part of scholarly publication, and conventions for cit<strong>in</strong>g resources digitally must be
viewed as part of a larger architectural design,” Smith expla<strong>in</strong>ed, “when the digital library is the global
<strong>in</strong>ternet, the natural architecture for scholarly publications is a hierarchy of service.” In addition to the
need for standards and conventions for cit<strong>in</strong>g resources or parts of resources, the importance of
standard conventions or ontologies for add<strong>in</strong>g semantic encod<strong>in</strong>g for named entities (such as citations)
to secondary literature and also to web pages and then l<strong>in</strong>k them to onl<strong>in</strong>e representations of primary
and other sources has been the subject of a series of recent blog posts by Sebastian Heath of the
American Numismatics Society (ANS). 171
In a 2010 post entitled “RDFa Patterns for Ancient World References,” 172 Heath described his efforts
to encode the year, different named entities such as Polemon, an imperial cult, and two text citations
with<strong>in</strong> a chosen text. He wanted to embed this <strong>in</strong>formation <strong>in</strong>to a sample web page us<strong>in</strong>g standards
such as RDFa 173 to make the data “automatically recognizable by third-parties.” To encode this
<strong>in</strong>formation he utilized RDFa and a number of other ontologies with resolvable namespaces (e.g.,
Dbpedia, CITO, FOAF, FRBR, OWL, RDFS, SKOS). Heath listed two references with<strong>in</strong> his sample
text, the first to a published <strong>in</strong>scription and the second to a recently published book. Interest<strong>in</strong>gly,
while Heath was able to l<strong>in</strong>k to a bibliographic description of the published book with<strong>in</strong> WorldCat,
encod<strong>in</strong>g the reference to the published <strong>in</strong>scription with CITO (Citation Typ<strong>in</strong>g Otology) was
problematic because there was no value for “cites as a primary source” available with<strong>in</strong> this ontology.
An additional complication was that Heath simply wanted to cite the <strong>in</strong>dividual <strong>in</strong>scription, and there
was no way to cite just one <strong>in</strong>scription or “work” with<strong>in</strong> the larger published volume of <strong>in</strong>scriptions.
“The concept of “Primary Source” and references thereto is important for the Humanities and we need
a way of <strong>in</strong>dicat<strong>in</strong>g its usage,” Heath noted. “It's also important that I'm referr<strong>in</strong>g to the publication of
169 http://chs75.chs.harvard.edu/projects/dig<strong>in</strong>c/techpub/cts-urn-overview
170 RFC2141 is a “memo” released by the Internet Eng<strong>in</strong>eer<strong>in</strong>g Task Force (IETF) that specified the “canonical syntax” for URNs
(http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2141)
171 http://numismatics.org
172 http://mediterraneanceramics.blogspot.com/2010/01/rdfa-patterns-for-ancient-world.html
173 “RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data <strong>in</strong> any markup language” (http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/). See also
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/