Gregory (apologies for cross posting)
Following Ann's comments about confusion, it might be worth pointing out to
list members that the term 'Collection' was originally proposed as an
appropriate term for the DCMI Type Vocabulary because it was a way to
identify that a resource was a collection without describing its parts.
Aggregations such as 'collection' are already expressed in
DC.Relation.HasPart and one of the most important characteristics of the
Relation element is that (in this case) it has an item level corollary,
Relation.IsPartOf.
In practice, the term, 'Collection', by itself, is not nearly so useful
because hierarchical trees or relationship models can't be generated from
it. Currently, the use of an implied default value to describe a single item
is fairly obscure and could be considered as an unnecessary complication to
any encoding scheme. In other words, an identified resource could be
considered to be an item if it is not a collection.
Nevertheless, I'd support Ann in suggesting that that the proposal by the
DCMI-Government Working Group to add 'Aggregation-level' as a scheme for
DC.Type opens up the more complex issue of how to express such levels of
granularity in ways that are not necessarily domain specific.
There's no question that the ability to describe a resource as a collection,
group, exhibition, program etc is needed. However, that this should be asked
of DC.Type is worthy of challenge. If AggregationLevel can be resolved in an
element other than DC.Type, then, the Type Working Group may eventually be
able to depreciate the term 'collection' within the DCMI Type Vocabulary.
IMHO this would be a good thing and cause less confusion.
Regards
Simon
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-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Apps [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, 3 August 2002 12:58 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Comments to the DC GOV WG new-term proposal
Dear All,
Some comments on the DC-GOV proposal:
1. Date qualifier 'acquired'. There seems to be a prolifieration of
qualifiers for date appearing? Is there really not one already defined
which is suitable? Eg 'available'? In the Comment, what does ERM
mean? I suggest acronyms should be expanded.
2. Rights qualifier 'accessRights'. This looks useful for other areas
than just DC-GOV. We'd been looking for such an element for
holding 'access' information for some of our resources. We'd
resorted to putting the information in a plain dc:rights elements, but
'access' is a bit different. So I would back this one.
3. Type scheme 'Aggregation-level'.
As chair of the DC-Type working group, I'm unhappy about the
statement: 'DC Gov. WG have contacted the "Type vocabulary
group" for a briefing on types, but have not got an answer yet'. I am
not aware of any formal contact from the DC-Gov group, assuming
it is the DC-Type WG which is referred to (and was unaware of this
scheme proposal). [I'm not really sure what sort of 'briefing' would
be expected from a DCMI Working Group.] So please could I
request that this statement be removed from this profile. It does not
seem a very appropriate statement to make in a published
application profile.
I can see that AggregationLevel would be useful in other areas. So I
wonder if it is wise to have have a definitive vocabulary. This will
mean putting in a formal proposal every time another item needs
adding. I think it would be better to have a slightly more informal
list, and maybe with more generic terms.
I don't really understand what 'volume' means, rather an overloaded
word (and I have no idea what MoReq means).
Someone else has already pointed out that 'Bibliographic item
Collection' sounds nonsense. Does it mean 'Collection of
bibliographic items'? If you used dc:type=Collection from
DCMIType, then a second 'Collection' becomes redundant, and you
could have just dc:type='bibliographic items' according to this
scheme.
AggregationLevel seems to overlap with the DC-Collections WG.
I'm sure that group will find it useful. So maybe some discussion
on terms between DC-Gov and DC-Collections would be useful.
To reply to some comments made yesterday:
The DC-Type group has been concerned only with the high-level
DCMI Type Vocabulary. A decision was made at DC2001 that the
task of defining lower-level types should be left to domain-specific
groups, as is the case with this proposal.
There is no intention of dropping 'collection' from the DCMI Type
Vocabulary. I don't think this causes confusion because all DC
elements are optional and repeatable. So you could have:
<meta name="DC.Type" scheme="DCMIType"
content="Collection" />
<meta name="DC.Type" scheme="AggregationLevel"
content="Folder" />
both within one metadata record. This would be following best
practice which is to have one or more instances of Type from the
DCMI Type Vocabulary and optionally one or more from a domain-
specific list.
Also there is no intention by the Type WG to suggest any qualifiers
for DC.Type such as 'collection'. In fact 'Collection' is a value of
dc:type not a refinement of it.
Best wishes,
Ann
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Ann Apps. Senior Analyst - Research & Development, MIMAS,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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