Hi Karen & Tom,

Rather belatedly, some thoughts of my own on the Guidelines for DCAPs
draft. 

Thanks very much for this document. I appreciate that a lot of work has
been done on it, and I think it provides a good basis for filling a gap
in DCMI's documentation which is long overdue for filling :-)

I have one general comment which I'll make here, and then a few more
specific, fairly minor ones which I'll try to send as a follow up.

My main concern is that I feel there is some contextual information
missing which makes some of the later sections of the document rather
more difficult to understand than they might be. In particular, I think
section 5 (on selecting/defining metadata terms) and section 6 (on the
DSP model) really have as a prerequisite some understanding of (for
section 5) the DCAM vocabulary model/RDF Schema and (for section 6) the
DCAM description model, and it seems to me it might be helpful for the
document to provide some more of that information "inline", rather than
assuming that readers will refer to other external sources.

Section 5 deals with the selection or definition, not just of any
metadata terms, but of metadata terms of the specific types used used in
RDF and in DC description sets. So I think it's important to have at
least some discussion of what those types of terms are, some of their
characteristics (e.g. range/domain relationships) and how the terms are
referenced in combination in DC metadata, before the current text of
section 5. Without this information, if I'm approaching the document
with a different "abstract model" in mind (e.g. if I'm familiar with the
tree-/container- models typically used in XML-based approaches), then
some of the discussion in section 5 will probably seem very alien. In
particular, I think the discussion which culminates in the table assumes
some knowledge of the DCAM description model, and that discussion really
requires the inclusion of some introductory description of that
description model in the document. (I think this also relates to
Douglas' point that some further guidance on defining terms would be
helpful.)

Similarly in section 6, and perhaps even more so than for the previous
section, understanding the discussion of "Description Templates" and
"Statement Templates" really hinges on understanding what "descriptions"
and "statements" are. So I think a description of the DCAM description
model is required before this part of the document. It's difficult to
understand why these particular sorts of templates are being discussed
unless I understand the nature of the structures they are templates for
:-) 

To some extent this influences section 4 too: the fundamental nature of
RDF - making assertions about relationships between resources -
conditions the nature of the models we use. 

I recognise that Sections 1 and 2 do make references to the fact that
the DCAM and RDF provide the foundations for the DCAP concept, but these
are largely passing references, and I think the document needs to
articulate more fully what this means, by providing more information
about those foundations: the core principle that we are making
assertions about relationships between resources; the DCAM vocabulary
model/RDF Schema; and (especially) the DCAM description model. 

I can imagine this being provided as a new section between the current
sections 4 & 5 (on the basis that the current section 5 is really where
the material that is dependent on this begins), but it could equally
well be provided earlier in the document, as part of section 2 or as a
new section between the current sections 2 and 3?

Pete
---
Pete Johnston
Technical Researcher, Eduserv Foundation
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