Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
> Folks:
> 
> I went in and changed the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core 
> using stuff from "Using Dublin Core" primarily.
> 
> You're welcome to see what you think and do some editing yourself, if 
> you've a mind to do so. I won't take it personally, I promise!

I haven't edited the document on Wikipedia (yet), and I don't really 
want to do so unilaterally, but (and this really applies to other 
introductory resources like the "Using Dublin Core" document and like 
the conference tutorials) I think that the role of the DCMI Abstract 
Model as providing the conceptual framework for DC should be presented 
more "up front" e.g. there should be a short/simplified summary 
description of the DCAM in the introductory section, or as a separate 
section following the intro and before the discussion of Simple DC and 
Qualified DC. Mentioning the DCAM _only_ as a tool for comparing 
different syntaxes is only telling half the story (IMHO) - though I 
think the DCAM doc itself might be slightly more "bullish" in its own 
intro paragraph! ;-).

Now sure, I appreciate that that might look like a case of "historical 
revisionism" to the casual observer who knows "the 15 elements came 
first" (or indeed only knows the 15 elements), but I do think we need to 
shift firmly towards putting the DCAM at the centre of our explanations 
of "what DC is". (If people want a history of the evolution of DC, and 
how DCMI got from "the 15 elements" to "the qualifiers" to the 
grammatical principles to the DCAM, OK, that's fine, but that's a 
different document.)

I recognise this probably goes against the way we've tended to introduce 
DC, but I'd go as far as saying that it is confusing/unhelpful to start 
talking about "elements" without first describing the DCAM, at least in 
some way - maybe not every fine detail, but the fundamental points about 
making statements that assert relationships between resources and 
values. Without such "contextual" information, it just begs the question 
of what an "element" is. It makes a "leap of faith" that readers already 
share a common understanding of what an element is, but (as we've found 
out somewhat painfully over the last few years), that is not the case: 
the term "element" is used to refer to different things in different 
contexts and readers draw their own (different, incompatible) 
conclusions ("Ah, they're talking about XML elements", "Ah, so they're 
referring to things like LOM elements", "Ah, they mean attribute-value 
pairs" etc etc etc).

I think the account of "Simple Dublin Core" also blurs the distinction 
between the DCMES as a set of terms, each of which may be deployed in 
many different "DC application profiles" with different constraints on 
their usage in a description set, and "Simple Dublin Core" as one such 
DCAP with one particular set of constraints. And in the account of 
"Qualified DC" I'm not sure the word "value" is being used in the way it 
is used in the DCAM. I think phrases like "the value may still be useful 
to a human reader" suggest that the reference is to (what the DCAM 
calls) "value strings".

Pete