On Fri, 13 July 2001, Jeffrey A. Young wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:20:53 -0500, Thomas G. Habing <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >up to date sample of one of our metadata files is available at
> >http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/uiLIb/05_lecuyer_full.met
>
> Here is a snippet from the example listed above:
>
> <dca:Person rdf:ID="AUTHOR-1">
> <dca:agentname>
> <dca:FNF>
> <rdf:value>L'Ecuyer, Pierre</rdf:value>
> </dca:FNF>
> </dca:agentname>
> <dca:agentaffiliation>Université de Montréal Département d'Informatique
et
> de Recherche Opérationnelle C.P. 6128 Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal PQ H3C
> 3J7 Canada</dca:agentaffiliation>
> <dca:agentidentifier rdf:resource="mailto:[log in to unmask]" />
> </dca:Person>
>
> I would expect the dca:agentidentifier's URI to be listed as the element's
> value rather than an rdf:resource attribute. In other words, we should be
> able to represent DC Agents independent of RDF.
>
> On the other hand, it might make sense to replicate the agentidentifier
URI
> in an rdf:about attribute in the dca:Person element. Here are the proposed
> changes:
>
> <dca:Person rdf:ID="AUTHOR-1" rdf:about="mailto:[log in to unmask]">
> <dca:agentname>
> <dca:FNF>
> <rdf:value>L'Ecuyer, Pierre</rdf:value>
> </dca:FNF>
> </dca:agentname>
> <dca:agentaffiliation>Université de Montréal Département d'Informatique
et
> de Recherche Opérationnelle C.P. 6128 Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal PQ H3C
> 3J7 Canada</dca:agentaffiliation>
> <dca:agentidentifier>mailto:[log in to unmask]</dca:agentidentifier>
> </dca:Person>
We had gone back and forth ourselves on whether mailto: link was better as
content of agentidentifier property node or as the attribute value of an
rdf:resource or rdf:about attribute. Your logic that including mailto: link
as node content is better to insure independence from RDF sounds good to me.
In addition, there still seems to be a natural temptation when parsing
unfamilar XML schemas to focus on node content more than attribute values,
so expressing mailto: link as content might increase likliehood it will be
included in indexing, transformations, etc.
We did consider including mailto: link as an rdf:about attribute value for
the typed node (in this case dca:Person) as you suggest. The argument
against doing it that way is the consideration that current RDF Model and
Syntax doesn't allow for both a rdf:ID and rdf:about attribute on the same
typed node. You can legally have:
<dca:Person rdf:ID="AUTHOR-1">
or
<dca:Person rdf:about="mailto:[log in to unmask]">
But the following is NOT legal in RDF (at least not when using dca:Person
the way we're using it):
<dca:Person rdf:ID="AUTHOR-1" rdf:about="mailto:[log in to unmask]">
SiRPAC gives parse errors for the last example. Of course one can argue
that our use of the rdf:ID in this case is rather trivial, in which case it
might be better to drop rdf:ID attribute in favor of using rdf:about for
mailto: link.
By the way, another comment we got back on all of this mentioned that the
DCMI Agents working group has not been very active of late and that it might
be better to go with vCard which has gained a fair amount of widespread
acceptance, at least for the time being. We're still mulling that
alternative approach over.
Thanks for the feedback.
Tim Cole
Library, University of Illinois at UC
|