Carl Lagoze wrote:
>
> <oa:author>
> <oa:name>Carl Lagoze</oa:name>
> <oa:organization>Cornell University</oa:organization>
> </oa:author>
>
> In your example, you enclose this all in 'dc:creator' tags. However,
> this, of course, means not using an appropriate literal in Tom Baker's
> terms and ends up getting us into all sorts of dumb down issues.
Maybe it is mis-using the term "appropriate literal",
but IMHO any fragment of text could be treated as a literal,
including one containing embedded XML markup if that markup
cannot be interpreted by the client.
This is probably where I diverge from Tom!
Thus I would argue that "just use the lot" is a viable
dumb-down rule in most instances. I believe that this
is a substantial part of the philosophy behind XML, after all!
It is also the motivation behind even lighter-weight
serialisations like DCSV (TM) ;-) The only more sophisticated
operation that can be recommended is "throw unknown tags away"
which in the instance above would convert
<dc:creator>
<oa:author>
<oa:name>Carl Lagoze</oa:name>
<oa:organization>Cornell University</oa:organization>
</oa:author>
</dc:creator>
into
<dc:creator> Carl Lagoze Cornell University</dc:creator>
which is not a bad outcome.
*** I definitely dislike the notion of providing an explicit
default value for two reasons:
1. it duplicates stored information, which is bad for normalisation, integrity, etc
2. where do you stop ... if you have to provide defaults for some
encodings, then why not all? So what is the (plain text?) default
for a URI encoded value such as http://purl.org/dc/ ?
--
Best regards Simon Cox
CSIRO Exploration and Mining
http://www.ned.dem.csiro.au/research/visualisation/
T: +61 8 9284 8443 F: +61 8 9389 1906 M: 0403 302 672
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