Hi Jose,
Today is my last day before a vacation and I wanted to point out that
there has been some interesting discussion in the Usage Board since
June 11, in response to your request for clarification about how the
Usage Board could handle a proposal related to agents (see
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-usage.html).
We see three sets of issues:
1) Element refinements of Creator/Contributor/Publisher -- things like
"Illustrator". We have been discussing a way to give approval to a
sub-set of the MARC relator terms (see Rebecca Guenther's posting of
June 22) -- an idea that was originally proposed in (I think) 1999.
Other working groups could put forward other such refinements, but I
think this Usage Board would prefer that we point to other
namespaces for really specialized terms and limit the refinements in
the DCMI namespace to a minimum number of particularly useful or
salient terms.
2) Types of agents, such as Person or Organization.
We would welcome a proposal.
3) Properties of persons and organizations, including contact
information. I don't believe anybody on the UB wants us to reinvent
vCard as a DCMI vocabulary. If Person or Organization were
recognized as DCMI types, however (signaling a broadening of our
implicit scope), then this would make other properties of agents
into candidates for DCMI terms.
If I have correctly summarized the tenor of discussion, my suggestion
to an Agent group would be to define the task as that of developing an
agent "profile" -- a bundle of terms useful for describing agents,
using existing DCMI elements, elements from other namespaces (eg,
vCard), and inventing further elements only where necessary. Those
further elements could then be submitted for approval, along with agent
types. Two past drafts we are aware of are:
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-agents/files/wd-agent-qual.html
http://www.nla.gov.au/meta/drafts/dcagent2.html
My colleagues may want to correct this summary...
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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