On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Rachel Heery wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Andy Powell wrote:
>
> >
> > 3) Carefully fit any newly proposed refinements for dc:creator and
> > dc:contributor directly under one or other (but not both) of those
> > elements. E.g. I would consider dcterms:editor as an element refinement
> > of dc:contributor, not dc:creator.
>
> I think this would be rather too restrictive.... some implementations may
> just want to use dc:creator and not bother with dc:contributor. In which
> case this solution denies them the opportunity to use DCMI approved
> qualifiers. I would hope that the syntax constraints would allow for the
> flexibility to use the various 'agent' qualifiers with each of the 'agent'
> elements.
I'd like to add a footnote to this discussion:
The agent trio is interesting. They are instances of a general 'agent'
class of objects, all of which, ideally, should share a number of
properties. It has been claimed that creator, publisher and contributor
are already refinements of a more abstract 'agent' element, an element
that was once upon a time called the 'secret agent' ;-) There is a
similar relation between the elements relation and source. I have long
felt that there is a need for a metadata algebra, which defines various
semantic operations on metadata elements, where element refinement is one.
The Harmony and the abc metadata set is close to this, but it seems to me
that they stopped when things started to get interesting.
To the extent one might want to limit the applicability of a given
refinement to a single element depends on the question one wants to
retain the reverse operation, the so-called dumb-down principle.
One reason for why these problems arise is that the old html syntax made
clear the refinement/dumb-down path, whereas these features now are hidden
in various schema definitions.
> Rachel
Sigge
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