Hi Andy,
Quoting Andy Powell <[log in to unmask]>:
> - an updated list of issues. Note that the issues list that I prepared
> for the last Usage Board meeting is at
>
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-usage/am-issues/
Re: Vocabulary terms as URIs
====
'DDC' is no longer required as a DCMI encoding scheme because the DDCness
of the value is indicated by the URI. Therefore, there is no requirement
to 'register' DDC with DCMI.
====
Leaving aside the issue of how this is represented in any given syntax....
I don't think this is right. The "DDCness of the value", or - generalising the
concept - the type of a resource, is not "indicated" by its URI. The URI is
always an opaque string. We still need an explicit statement/triple providing
the type of the value (i.e. an "encoding scheme") in order to be able to tell
that the resource identified by the URI info:ddc/22/eng//004.678 is a resource
of type http://purl.org/dc/terms/DDC .
Now sure, that may be provided in a "related description" in a document owned by
OCLC (and they might coin and deploy a non-DCMI-owned URI to denote the class
DDC), but that typing still has to be made explicit somewhere. You can't guess
it from the URI, even from an info URI using the "ddc" info namespace.
So (IMHO) the use of value URIs does not remove the need for encoding
schemes/resource typing.
Pete
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