One case that particularly comes to mind is where we have multiple different scans of the same work -- eg we have multiple (incomplete) sets of the early 1800s colour engravings from Ackermann's Microcosm of London, or Pyne's Royal Palaces, or Audubon's Birds of America etc.

It seems a shame not to be able to abstract the duplicated information between different scans -- eg the creatorship, the publication history, the topic list of items depicted -- given that they are versions of the same work.

However, if the different scans have been made independently, there is no chain of derivation between them.   And - probably - the individual engravings would not pass WD notability, so would not have separate items, though the book they were collected in probably would.

So it doesn't seem that there would be an item on which to store the data that would be common between the different versions of the image.

(Similarly, multiple reproductions of the same vintage photograph, etc).

Perhaps there might be a case for CommonsData items for works that belong to a sequence, where the sequence has an item on Wikidata?

Or perhaps they should just have items on Wikidata?

 -- James.


On 10/10/2014 17:08, Gergo Tisza wrote:

Thanks for the pointers, James! I'll try to digest them.

Our thoughts on the issue of representing relationships between works are
not fully formed yet, but the current idea is loosely that
* if the original work has a Wikidata item (according to whatever
notability guidelines the community prefers), link to that
* otherwise if it is a Commons image, link to the local data item of that
image
* otherwise representing the relationships in full detail is probably not
that important, so it's fine to just add the authors of the originals as
contributors to the CommonsData entry with some generic role such as
"author of a source work", without trying to represent the accurate
relationship between them.

So, if there is a chain of "derivative of" relationships between works
which have Wikidata or CommonsData items, we can walk the chain upon
extraction and collect the authors. Where the theoretical chain extends
outside Wikidata+CommonsData, the actual (as stored in Wikibase) chain
would have author information from the outlying nodes "squashed" into the
edge nodes.

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 11:08 AM, James Heald <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

Gergo,

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