Eric,
Thanks very much for the detailed reply. It was really helpful in enabling
me to start to see the problems I was grappling with from a different
perspective.
> While
> the URI in one case might be used to retrieve something off of the web
> (e.g. http GET), in another case its simply a key which can be used to ask
> other services what it "knows" about the identified resource.
Yes! This is exactly what I was circling around but hadn't managed to see
clearly.
> The 'primacy' is in term of the URI. Everything else (in sort) can be
> viewed as "annotations". Who can say what about these URI's are
> unbounded. In this case we're talking about 2 characteristics people are
> trying to say things about these URIs... rdfs:label and rdfs:comment, the
> values of which may be encoded in different languages. Next we'll be
> talking about xx:status or xx:equals. And I might for my own purposes
talk
> about xx:usesAllTheTime (or whatever...). Which annotations you
> (individual, community, etc.) chooses to trust, however, are dependant the
> particular goals and desired outcome. In terms of the translations, I can
> very well imagine that some additional DCMI board (usage?) might define
> which might be considered the "official" DCMI translations.
>
> Given this, the purpose of the registry group then is not to define which
> is the "correct" description, but provide guidance as to which properties
> and classes it wants to in essence "privilege" (e.g. give special
> preference in an application for serving a particular set of needs) for
> supporting the DCMI registry service.
Ah... right....yes. Thanks, it took me a while to grasp this way of looking
at it, but I think I get it.
I was struggling to express why I had a problem with the notion of the
registry as "just" a database of RDF content. Yes, I appreciated it _was_
precisely a database of RDF content, but I felt there were "certain sorts"
of RDF content which the registry was particularly concerned with. This
approach of "privileging" particular classes and properties for the registry
application seems to capture this.
> Again, please remember.. not all of these properties need to be included
in
> the actual DC* schemas. Simply agreeing on the URI for terms allows for
> these different files to be merged together.
Yes, absolutely. I shall try to unlearn my attachment to the notion of
schema-as-authoritative-file-at-one-URL!
Pete
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