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!
Andy
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