Andy - I share your concerns about
(a) the absolute necessity or usefulness of a type indicator for the value of any element
(b) casual additions to the implied datamodel
(c) special treatment for the CCP elements
However,
(a) the CCP working group and many many implementors have consistently requested that this facility be provided, and many existing
implementations kludge it anyway, so this is an argument that is already over - DCMES credibility is on the line if we duck this
(b) this really is not such a casual addition - the concept that the resource-being-pointed-to will have a known "type" is nothing new - exactly
where this info is to be stored is an issue, but the notion of typed-entities is clear
(c) I made the case for why special treatment in this case is not a risk in the comments along with the proposal. Look at it as the first
example of more general resource typing.
I don't understand your reference to HTML - as far as I can see this issue is really not one of any particular syntax, though HTML cannot handle
it elegantly, for sure.
Andy Powell wrote:
>
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Simon Cox wrote:
>
> > As discussed in Tuesday conf. call, here's a revised proposal for a
> > third category to be added to the "Principles" document:
> >
> > ==========
> > 3. Agent-type. These qualifiers specify the type of the entity which is
> > identified by a value of the Creator, Contributor, Publisher elements (CCP).
> > This is typically a person, organisation, instrument, or other entity
> > capable of creative acts or control of real or intellectual property.
> > While this type is a property of another resource (given by the value of
> > the CCP element), it is considered useful for discovery of the present
> > resource (i.e. that one which is the subject of the DCMES description)
> > by many communities. If a value qualified with an Agent-type is encountered
> > by a client that does not support this category of qualifier, it can be
> > ignored without harming the client application. The definition of
> > each Agent-type must be clear and publicly available.
>
> I strongly disagree with this special treatment of the 'agent' elements.
>
> *If* there were a real requirement to indicate the type of the related
> object (party) identified by the Creator, Contributor and Publisher
> elements and, *if* we choose to alter the data-model to allow for this,
> then we should also allow a similar mechanism for Relation and Source.
> I.e. the data-model should allow us to indicate the type of the related
> resource identified by the Relation and Source elements.
>
> However, I don't believe that there is a real requirement for this (though
> I think that there may be a perceived requirement because of the
> limitations of HTML META tags).
>
> Information about the type of a related 'resource', whether it is a
> related person, organisation, text, image or whatever, belongs in the
> description of that relation resource.
>
> Adding this category to the principles document implies an addition to the
> data-model that we are not ready to make. Please don't do this!
--
Best Simon
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