Dear all,
Jose Borbinha, copied to this message, is interested in renewing the
momentum for a DCMI Agent Core. According to our current process, any
such proposal would land before the Usage Board, so I would like to
examine some assumptions and pose some questions. Depending on our
discussion, perhaps we could move this to dc-architecture, where anyone
could participate.
-- I am assuming that a DCMI Agent Core would be similar to, but
orthogonal to, the current Dublin Core. In other words, it would be
a set of core elements -- elements that could be qualified -- only
the properties would refer to the class People instead of the more
generic Resources. The adoption of an Agent Core (DCAMES?), then,
would have no affect on the existing Dublin Core (DCMES).
-- In my opinion, an Agent Core should be evaluated completely
independently of DCMES by asking: "Are these good, well-defined core
attributes, and are they useful for cross-domain searching"?
-- In practice, people may want to mix and match from these two sets in
particular application environments -- people want to look at
Creators not just as names, but as entities (resources) that can
have arbitrarily large sets of properties of their own. Roland's
DC-in-RDF draft explains how this can be done without compromising
the dumb-down rule. However, I do not think the Usage Board would
need to rule specifically on the relationship between (say)
dc:creator and an Agent Core. For that, we would need a construct
like Application Profile (Element Profile?), which we do not
currently have.
-- If we go the route of One Big Namespace (as is being discussed now
in dc-architecture), would the elements of an Agent Core go into
this, or would we create for it a separate namespace (such as we
did, perhaps wrongly, for DCMES)?
Would anyone have any reservations about having the UB approve a
well-defined and sensible Agent Core? How thorough would our review
need to be? Would we set a higher standard for these than for any
other proposed elements?
Tom
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker [log in to unmask]
GMD Library
Schloss Birlinghoven +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
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