Many people are continuing to build DC applications using 'plain' XML
(i.e. not RDF/XML). DCMI, and this group in particular, provides very
little help for these people - other than to say that they have made the
wrong technology choice by not using RDF/XML!
This means that people who choose to implement using XML are having to
make decisions about their implementations based on a mixture of
guess-work, the little (sometimes contradictory) information they can
glean from existing recommendations/draft recommendations and what others
have done before them. This is not ideal - and different implementations
are making different design choices. Even simple issues, like whether DC
element names have an upper or lower case first letter, are not clear-cut
:-(.
I've put my own thoughts on guidelines for XML implementors in a document
at
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc/dc-xml-guidelines/
I make 8 recommendations. It's not finished yet - I'd like to add
something about mixing DC metadata with other metadata schemas. And I
have references to add. Nevertheless, I'd welcome comments on these
guidelines, both on whether such guidelines are useful in principle and
on whether these particular guidelines are the right ones!
Note: as I indicate in the document, I am not taking a position on the
relative merits of using 'plain' XML vs. RDF/XML. I am acknowledging
that, whatever DCMI and W3C say, people are still choosing not to use RDF
for their applications.
Andy
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