This is to alert you that the final version of the Qualifier ballot
should be up for voting by Monday.  We are proposing that the deadline for 
voting should be April 15.  A few remarks from the Executive Committee 
follow.

Like the editorial board of an academic journal, the Usage Committee
reviews proposals for approval or rejection.  Proposals that fall short
of the committee's criteria or principles should be sent back to
working groups with comments, which may include suggestions on how to
revise and resubmit.  Ideally, the Usage Committee should not undertake
substantial revisions on its own.

At present, however, the DCMI is under pressure from many fronts to
produce results.  The element qualifiers and data model were long
discussed in separate working groups, and now discussion of these
issues has converged on the Usage Committee.  We are confronting
several issues all at once -- a new voting process, our data model, and
the overall partitioning of our vocabularies.  Respect for process must
be weighed against the need to move forward in a timely manner (and many 
would argue we are substantially overdue now).

The first and unofficial round of voting confirmed that the large
majority of qualifiers on the table are uncontroversial.  Some of the
qualifiers proposed by the Agent Working Group, however, have generated
significant disagreement.  On 8 March, Eric posted two draft ballots
reflecting two alternative positions with regard to the Agent elements
[1] -- one which included all of the Agent qualifiers as proposed, and
one which removed some of the qualifiers to a separate Agent Core and
replaced the proposal for Role with a short list of MARC Relator terms
put forward by the DC-Libraries group.

The members of the Executive Committee do not believe that we will be
able to resolve these basic differences by delaying the vote any
further.  It is our majority opinion that we go ahead with
a ballot based on the latter proposal, with one important difference.
The ballot we are putting forward replaces Role with a short list of
MARC Relator terms that would be maintained by the Network Development
and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress and removes all
proposed qualifiers that are descriptive of creators, contributors, and
publishers per se (as opposed being descriptive of the resource
itself).  It had been proposed that these qualifiers be put into a
separate ballot for approval as a draft element set for people, but we
feel that this task should be left to working groups.

Based on feedback from Usage Committee members over the past three
weeks, we believe that this position is supported by a strong majority
of its members.

We see our position as a conservative one that avoids voting on
positions which are strongly controversial, which still lack
explanatory principles, and which presuppose a more developed data
model than we have.  Moreover, we note that -- terminology aside -- our
two principles of qualification are largely in line with the grammar of
RDF.  It is clear that more work is needed on the problem of
identifying and describing agents.  Working groups should therefore be
tasked with re-examining the issues and submitting proposals for future
voting rounds.

The DCMI Executive Committee


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