On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 05:50:04PM -0800, Karen Coyle wrote:
> > In this diagram, the resource being described is a translation by person AAA
> > of a work by person BBB illustrated by person CCC and published by corporate
> > body DDD.
> >
> > So we have five entities: the resource, three persons and one body
> 
> John, my understanding is that you would have the following elements:
> 
> rda: creator ------|--->| rda-person: BBB |
> rda: translator ---|--->| rda-person: AAA |
> rda: illustrator --|--->| rda-person: CCC |
> rda: publisher ----|--->| rda-body: DDD   |
> 
> These would each be a property relating to the resource. (Or, the WEMI
> if you include the FRBR levels.)
> 
> Roles like "illustrator" would be defined in the scheme as being of
> type "rda: contributor", and contributor would be a class with a
> definition something like dcterms:contributor. So when you use
> "illustrator" it is implied that it is a member of the class
> "contributor" but you wouldn't include "contributor" in your actual
> data. The classes act like categories or groupings of properties; they
> aren't used as properties in the metadata.
> 
> The key thing is that the role *is* the property, not something added
> on to the property. This is very different from how we view agents
> today in our records.

Something of relevance to this discussion: Several years ago,
the DCMI Usage Board worked with the Network Development and
MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress on coining RDF
properties for the MARC Relator terms and defining a sub-set
of those terms as sub-properties of dc:contributor [1,2,3].

Note that the URIs coined for MARC relators do
not follow the convention of lowercase names (e.g.,
http://www.loc.gov/loc.terms/relators/TRC for "Transcriber"),
but I believe this was because the original codes were already
being used in uppercase.  They are nonetheless clearly RDF
properties, so marcrel:TRC would be used in metadata as a
property, not as something added on to a property.

Tom

[1] http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/relators/
[2] http://www.loc.gov/loc.terms/relators/dc-relators.html
[3] http://www.loc.gov/loc.terms/relators/dc-relators.xml

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker <[log in to unmask]>