Aaron, I was just today on another discussion where the "strings v.
things" came up. AS is so often the case, I think the answer here will
have to be: "it depends."
Here's the use case that was discussed today:
You are creating the metadata for a book. You may find a URI
representing the author, and perhaps the subject headings. But assume
that at the moment you have no idea if there is a URI for some other
element -- in our use case, the element was the name of a series. As a
practical matter, your choices are:
1) spend minutes or hours combing the web for a URI
2) mint a URI for the series, which assumes a) that you have the
technology at hand to create a useful entity for the series and that b)
others will be able to resolve to it to find out if it is the same
series they are encountering in their metadata creation event
3) give the name of series as a literal, hoping that in the future this
series will be well-defined and identified.
I actually think that in many instances of metadata creation, #3 is the
only practical route to take, and the only one likely to be taken by
many because it has the least friction. By dis-allowing literals, you
may hinder the creation of metadata. (Undoubtedly this is what motivated
schema.org, and is also what motivated DC at its origins.)
The dilemma, in my mind, is how to manage this "either/or" -- either
strings or things -- in the DCAM model.
kc
On 6/21/12 11:33 AM, Aaron Rubinstein wrote:
> I was reading over the report from the 6/8 DCAM telecon and there was one discussion in particular that struck me and I think might be worth a bit more thought.
>
> Surrounding the discussion about the ISBD example and integrating SESes into DCAM, Antoine made this statement:
>
> "Antoine: RDF is about encoding as little information in the string as
> possible. That's why datatypes are not used much. I don't think DCAM should
> have a different approach."
>
> Followed a little later with this from Karen:
>
> "Karen: In every case where you have multiple things, but the whole can repeat.
> You can have multiple titles with multiple subtitles. A lot of this stuff goes
> away when we use identifiers for things, but not all. A lot of what we have
> should be replaced with URIs."
>
> I think both of these points are very interesting from the perspective of how DCAM might contribute to a best practices for metadata in use. We obviously need to consider the manipulation and ultimately conversion of legacy data but I think we should also be designing the DCAM toward a best practices approach as well.
>
> To that end, I'd be interested in hearing what others think about attempting to limit a reliance on strings in our DCAM design patterns in favor of URIs or other flavors of identifiers.
>
> FWIW, I am in agreement with Antoine here.
>
> Aaron
>
--
Karen Coyle
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