On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, John Kunze wrote:
> Two element qualifiers that are almost completely undefined in the original
> DC specification are "Type" and "Identifier". There's one lousy sentence:
>
> "In the example below, it is assumed that the sub-elements Type
> and Identifier have been defined." ... [ 4 examples appear also ]
>
> This is simply not enough to work with. The User Guide Group was unable
> to describe them without making too many second guesses as to how they
> interacted with the Role qualifier and other elements in general, and so
> it dropped them. Pending meta2's formulation of clearer term definitions
> and goals, these qualifiers needlessly complicate the DC and are too hard
> to explain, so I propose to merge Type's function into Role and omit
> any mention of Type and Identifier qualifiers from the DC spec.
Take a look at the formulation that Paul Miller came up with for the Type
sub-element; he describes it in his Ariadne article "Metadata for the
Masses" available at
<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ariadne/issue5/metadata-masses/#scheme>. He
uses the Scheme sub-element to refer to the name of existing coding
schemes and the Type sub-element for identifying element uses that don't
conform to an external data scheme.
At the time he wrote the article, our sub-elements document used a
different convention but we quickly changed ours to bring it into line
with Paul's eminently sensible suggestion. Rather than dropping Type, I'd
propose that we formally adopt the mechanism Paul suggested in his
article. Its simple to understand and it works.
As for the Identifier sub-element, I'm happy to loose that; we don't even
have it in our list
(<URL:http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Metadata/DC-SubElements.html>) and nobody
has complained yet which tends to imply that nobody is interested in it.
We still need Role (for the OtherAgent element) and I'd still like
Language and Charset to be considered as valid sub-elements for all
elements.
Tatty bye,
Jim'll
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND. LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl. More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *
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