There are several emergent issues in the DCQ Schema thread at this time:
1. Andy is correct in that the current state of affairs is quite bad.
Pointing to an incorrect RDF Schema is inappropriate.
2. Andy and Carl are correct in observing that the namespace policy does not
specify a particular encoding idiom, but rather, indicate that:
"All DCMI namespace URIs will resolve to a machine-processable
DCMI term declaration for all the terms within that namespace."
3. Eric Miller has offered a rendition of an RDF schema that he believes
represents the current state of DC qualifiers and has asked for additional
attention to this scheme to determine its concordance with DCMI
recommendations on elements and qualifiers:
http://www.w3.org/2001/11/26/dcq
4. DCMI is on record as indicating that at this time the state of flux as
regards RDF and XML schemas makes it undesireable to recommend one or
another machine-processable encoding of DCMI metadata, and that the natural
consequence of this is the necessity of supporting alternative encodings.
My conclusion from this is that we need both an accurate RDF Schema
representation and an accurate XML Schema representation, and that their
style should be very similar (and hence easily interconvertible).
Is it possible that a small task force representing each of these camps
might direct focussed and immediate attention to solving this problem in the
near term?
Eric is the natural leader of the RDF camp, and has in fact invested
significant effort in articulating that version. I am hoping that, as the
digital library domain's major thrust towards interoperable metadata,
technical representatives of the OAI might help us convert their encoding of
DC into the canonical XML schema representation (but including both the base
element set *and* qualifiers).
How we point to them is another issue, but one step at a time.
stu
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