Dear all,

I have been reading the recent discussions on the Usage Committee 
deliberations with growing disappointment and concern.  Let me try to 
explain.

I became involved in DCMI because of the promise of a simple set of 
elements for coarse grained, cross discipline resource discovery. 
The digital tourist metaphor.  I believe the unqualified DCMES 1.1 
can serve this function.  CIMI's first testbed on using the DCMES 1.1 
proved to our satisfaction that one can represent museum information 
in DCMES for the purposes of coarse discovery but without richness 
that one from the museum community would expect in a richer 
description.  We accepted that loss of richness for the gain of cross 
domain discovery.  The DCMES 1.1 is not a vehicle for describing 
museum objects no how no way and we'd never propose it be used for 
that. It can and should be promoted for what it's good for. 
Unfortunately to date this is something the DCMI has completely 
failed to do. Instead we have concentrated on trying to build 
increasingly complex structures.

The experience of the last 15 months of attempting to develop 
qualifiers has led me to the conclusion that trying to build rich 
complexity on top of the 15 elements in the DCMES is unworkable 
beyond simple element refinement and value encoding according to the 
principles of refine not extend and dumb-down. I think the tortured 
road since DC7 is evidence of this as are the recent deliberations of 
the Usage committee.  Certainly the CIMI testbed experience of trying 
to develop qualifiers was essentially a failure.  This was partly 
because in the last 12 months of trying DCMI couldn't deliver a basic 
set of qualifiers and partly because we found trying to build a rich 
structure on top of the DCMES 1.1 caused the house of cards to come 
crashing down each and every time we tried.  We have now abandoned 
our work on qualifiers for DCMES for museum information to 
concentrate on developing richer descriptions for our own community. 
If and when DCMI ever publishes a set of Qualifiers and accompanying 
guidance documents we will then review them for utility.

What CIMI will be doing - and something I think the DCMI should be 
doing as the highest priority - is trying to figure out how different 
sets of metadata from various communities can work together.  This is 
what we talked about way back when the Warwick Framework was first 
proposed.  At that time we said we needed 2 things:  a simple element 
set and a way to understand different sets of metadata.  It has been 
a critical mistake not to have put more effort into this work sooner.

I hope that the Usage committee can wrap up a vote on a core set of 
qualifiers (element refinement and value encoding) then publish them 
along with the clear explanation of the principles and rules for how 
they were created. Lets declare victory and go out and promote it.

Then lets turn our collective attention and intelligence to really 
addressing the problem of how different sets of metadata can 
interwork and in doing that address some of the process problems we 
have (like in getting draft documents through an approval process).

Best regards,  John