On Tue, Sep 16, 2003 at 11:45:40PM +0200, Roland Schwaenzl wrote:
> > > > The DCAP guidelines address (by analogy) the question of
> > > > whether a record could contain zero properties and still be
> > > > said to conform, as follows: "A DCAP consists of... one or
> > > > more Term Usages." That seems like a sensible criterion.
> > > > (By another analogy, one would not say that an English
> > > > speaker sitting quietly and not uttering a single word was
> > > > "speaking English".)
>
> Don't think this is an analogy - or would you claim: to be quiet
> for a moment is non-conformant to English?
No, but being silent is not a "speech act", so an assertionless
record would not be a "metadata act". Not being a speech act, one
could not say if it were an "English speech act".
Alternatively, if one were to consider a header declaring
namespaces already to be a "metadata act", that act would still
not involve the use of Dublin Core terms, so it still would
not necessarily be a "Dublin Core metadata act". I think... ;-)
> RDF doesn't like the graphs, which don't have at least one
> arc - but is that a big issue really?
It seems intuitively desirable to define the boundary for
"Dublin Core" instances in terms of using "at least one"
Dublin Core term in a DCMI grammatical context. By this
criterion, I guess a record containing just one DC element
with a null value could be construed as a "Dublin Core"
statement ("Resource has dc:title").
> Are you sure the existing XML schema for
> simple DC catch the empty worm as an error?
No, I'm not sure... -- is this a problem?
> In record 2 below there is a nice qualified DC interpretation of the record -
>
> Would you accept an application as conformant, which is aware of
> <my:duration> --subPropertyOf--> <dct:extend>, and treats incoming
> records by creating a qualified DC interpretation from those by trying to resolve
> relations to DC Terms?
Sure, a simultaneous interpreter! ;-)
> > > Record 2
> > > --------
> > >
> > > <my:price>$25</my:price>
> > > <my:duration>25 seconds</my:duration>
[snip]
> In my view all three records have a well-defined qualified
> DC and a well-defined simple DC Interpretation.
[snip]
> R2: DCQI <dct:extent>25 seconds</dct:extent>
> DCSI <dc:format>25 seconds</dc:format>
Sure, but it is the interpreter who is speaking DC, not the record,
unless I am missing something.
> Then a qualified DC record would be a record, such that it's DCQI
> coincides with the original record.
> A simple DC record would be .....
We have already seen that the notion of "record" is problematic
for various reasons. Let me suggest another reason: the
record itself is arguably just one part of the larger context
of what for the sake of argument one might call an "act of
metadata communication" that includes all such additional
transformations and interpretations.
Just as you may be thinking in German and communicating
in English, an application could have a store of "non-DC"
records and disclose them as DC by using schemas to interpret
them before utterance. So a record could be "non-DC" but
the larger "metadata act" is DC.
That said, I recognize that the notion of a "metadata act"
might seem amusing from readers who do not catch the allusion
to a "speech act" (from linguistics) but if we are going
to talk sensibly about a broader context in which metadata
records are not just served up "as is", we will need some
sort of handle for that context.
> A dc15 interpretation, will treat all 3 records as "silence".
> A dct2001 application would discard/have a problem with dct:dateSubmitted.
> It will not be able to perform a dumbdown to dc:date either.
Okay...
> The abstract model does not completely determine the behaviour
> of an application....
>
> I don't think that's a surprise.
Right...;-)
> An application profile could mean two things in this context:
> A commitment of a sender S to stay with a fixed vocabulary and
> a commitment by a receiver R on how to treat vocabularies.
To stretch the analogy, it extends the framework of metadata
acts to include the linguistic competence and interpretive
ability of the recipient.
> Both profiles might or might not contain a perspective of development
> over time.
> Some S and R application profiles match (interoperate) "better" than others -
> no surprise either....
Yep.
> Such scenarios could play on the ground of the same abstract
> model. Why not?
Fine with me, especially if we can find a suitable replacement
for "metadata act"...
This is sounding like a bigger undertaking, but we wouldn't
need to write a dissertation -- a paragraph or two describing
the larger context (larger than just source records) and giving
handles to its various parts so that we can be specific about
_which parts_ are "Dublin Core" in a given situation could
be helpful.
Tom
--
Dr. Thomas Baker [log in to unmask]
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