Interesting proposal from Andy. Many of us wish that there were not three
elements for different kinds of names/agents or whatever you want to call
them. Most applications would want to index all together anyway. In answer
to what the MARC relator list does, it does have Creator and Publisher
defined as relator terms. I'm not sure why we'd want to use an element
refinement "creator" with DC:Contributor; any ideas on that? But I could
see using the refinement "publisher" with contributor.
If we did what Andy is suggesting, too bad we can't change the element
"Contributor" to "Name" or something like that. But I guess we
can't. There may be still be some feeling that the word
"contributor" somehow suggests a secondary role. Or maybe that's the
reason to allow creator as a refinement?
Sorry if I'm rambling on-- just trying sort out this interesting idea.
Rebecca
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Andy Powell wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Thomas Baker wrote:
>
> > We see three sets of issues:
>
> Good summary of the issues.
>
> I appreciate that this is not the list to discuss this, but fwiw, here are
> my personal opinions on these three 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.
>
> I'd like to see MARC relator terms specified as refinements of
> dc:contributor only. If the MARC terms do not include creator and
> publisher, then I would like to see creator and publisher proposed as
> refinements of contributor, i.e. we have dcq:creator and dcq:publisher
> defined as being equivalent to dc:creator and dc:publisher but also as
> refinements of dc:contributor. In effect we deprecate the use of
> dc:creator and dc:publisher, recommending use of dcq:creator and
> dcq:publisher instead.
>
> This puts all the 'agent' elements other than dc:contributor at the same
> level - and everything dumbs down to dc:contributor. No existing stuff
> breaks and no new terms need adding to the dc namespace. ...and it moves
> us away from the problem where one or more of the terms in the MARC list
> can dumb-down to several terms in the dc namespace.
>
> > 2) Types of agents, such as Person or Organization.
> > We would welcome a proposal.
>
> We more or less have a list don't we? I'd like to see this as a second
> DCMI AgentType vocabulary rather than as additional terms in DCMI Type.
>
> > 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.
>
> One or more application profiles that use terms from dc, dcq and vCard
> namespaces is what we want here isn't it?
>
> But I guess I need to resend this message to the DC Agents WG?! :-)
>
> Andy
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