Hi Robina,

> A question has come up in the TEL project about how to
> indicate in the metadata for an object which collection that
> object belongs to.  TEL is a collection of separate
> collections provided by different partners.  When users find
> a record for an object they would like to know which
> collection it belongs to.
>
> The "IsPartOf" refinement for Relation would seem an obvious
> candidate but this can be used for many types of parent
> relationships.

Yes, in the general case, you can't infer anything about the type
(Journal, Collection, ...) of the object/value of a dcterms:isPartOf
property. As you suggest below, you might be able to do this if you can
control the use of that property in the context of your application.
i.e. you can specify to your metadata creators that "dcterms:isPartOf
should be used only to describe relations between Objects and
Collections". But it sounds as if you haven't got that option....

> We in TEL are wondering if we should define a
> specific term in our application-profile-for-objects that
> would only be used to indicate that the parent is a
> collection (which has been described with a collection level
> description) and not for example, a journal.  An alternative
> may be to limit the use of the IsPartOf refinement in the TEL
> AP to this purpose, but this may cause problems for data
> providers who already use it for other purposes.

... so I can only suggest either

(i) collecting some "related metadata" about the type of the objects of
dcterms:isPartOf

<http://example.org/object1> dcterms:isPartOf
<http://example.org/journal1>  ;
                             dcterms:isPartOf
<http://example.org/collection1>  .

<http://example.org/journal1> dc:type <http://example.org/Journal>  .

<http://example.org/collection1> dc:type dcmitype:Collection .

But I can see that makes your application quite a lot more complicated,
because you have to deal with metadata about these multiple resources.
Or

(ii) (as you suggest) introducing an application-specific property

<http://example.org/object1> tel:isPartOf
<http://example.org/collection1> .

(or tel:isPartOfCollection or tel:isMemberOf or whatever you prefer)
which you know is deployed only to describe the object-collection
relation.

Pete