On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Thomas Baker wrote:
> However, UB didn't even look at the IEEE elements, officially (of
> course, we peeked...). It was out of our scope, and our Recommendation
> makes no reference to them. By analogy, I should think we would not
> officially care which elements of vCard were recommended, since we (as
> the Usage Board) would not be adding our own Recommendation.
Agreed.
> > This first statement makes about as much sense as DCMI telling MARC how to
> > handle names from DC records. And we'd only be making statements about the
> > usefulness of the relator terms (or anybody else's terms) in reference to
> > our view of the world, not about how they might use the same terms. I
> > think that's legit for us to do. If not us, who?
>
> Hmm. You say yes, Andy says no... I think it would be nice if UB could
> make some statement with regard to the MARC relator terms, but it is unclear
> to me how best to do this.
I'll try and clarify why I said no (especially seeing as I suggested it in
the first place!). In theory, I think it would be quite sensibly within
our scope for us to make statements of the form 'element X (from some
non-DCMI namespace) is a valid refinement of element Y (from a DCMI
namespace)'. In practice I'm concerned about two things. Firstly, there
may well be an awful lot of Xs out there for us to make such
statements about! Secondly, assuming we don't manage to make statements
about all possible Xs, then are we implicity giving some DCMI credibility
to those Xs that we do choose to make statements about? If so, is that a
problem? Is that what we want to do?
> I believe the fundamental issue is: to what class of objects does our
> vocabulary refer? Is the term "resource" broad enough to cover
> "people" ("agents")?
I very much agree that this is a fundamental issue - and one that is
crucial to DCMI. I'm amazed that DCMI doesn't have an agreed definition
for 'resource'. It's not a UB issue however?
Andy
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