On Thu, 16 Jan 1997, Stu Weibel wrote:
> First: The labels you have chosen conflict in some programming languages
> with reserved words, e.g. Date. I would therefore recommend to prefix all
> your labels with something like "DC_" for Dublin Core, which would make
> them definetly free. The label for Date would then read DC_Date.
This is a bit bogus; the variable name that you use to represent the DC
date inside your programs can be anything (and that's the only reason it
would clash with the programming language's reserved words). Nothing in
the DC docs says that you have to name your variables after the DC
elements and in most cases will probably quite often be something
different (I often use Perl hashed arrays called something like DCMetadata
with the DC element names and qualifiers used as the keys).
> Second: Your recommendation to code languages according to Z39.53 three
> character codes for written languages, I do not like. This codification
> is a national one and does not code dialects, like American English or
> Swiss German. There is already an international agreed Codification for
> Languages and dialects inclusive a recommendation for their use
> especially in librarian contexts: It is the "ISO-639 (1988-04-01) Code
> for the representation of names of languages" issued by the International
> Organization for Standardization.
ISO639 is another scheme qualifier value for the language element in the
draft DC Qualifiers document. In fact after comments from some DCers on
the last draft I put out after Christmas, I added a "freetext" option and
made that the default as it was pointed out that Joe Public isn't going to
have a copy of ISO639 or Z39.53 lying about and is probably just going to
enter "English" or "French" or anything. This seemed like a reasonable
argument to me.
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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