Perhaps I was too hastly in a previous message to express the need for a "requirements document". This starts to sound like a scarey engineering task that could occupy lots of time.
I won't spend time coming up with a new name for this "document" - let me just state some of the requirements-like questions we need to answer before we proceed on the DC. This is not meant to be all inclusive nor are my possible answers meant to be all inclusive.
- What are the types of resources we wish to describe with the DC - textual documents? HTML documents? images and text? all networked documents? simple (one per file) documents? complex (many files/many locations) documents?
- What is the community of content providers that we are aiming at? professional catalogers? web-masters? casual authors?
- How are these content providers/creators going to create Dublin Core records? manually? tools? second-party additions?
- What are the types of tools do we expect will be "users" of the Dublin Core? Lycos/Alta-Vista like? on-line catalogues?
- Where do we see the Dublin Core fitting in to the general Information Discovery/domain-specific searching/browsing/serendipity/retrieval process?
- How does the Dublin Core relate to other metadata sets? Is it a summarization of other sets of metadata? Which sets of metadata does it summarize?
Feel free to add to this list or argue with it. But we need to have firm answers to these questions to properly engineer this thing. With all due respects to Stu's consensus-building motivations, it simply is not sufficient as we try to really create something that is useful to the community and will have some lasting value.
Carl
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