The following is a note I received about the Dublin Core
I'm particularly interested in what people think of his comments
vis a vis language codes
stu
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>From [log in to unmask] Thu Jan 16 12:34:59 1997
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Subject: Dublin Core Metadata Set
Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 18:35:36 +0100
Hi Stuart,
may I shortly introduce myself:
I have been working in the context of dictionary data to support our
large databases, inclusive creation of metadata databases about
documentation archived at our company.
The company I am working for is NOVARTIS, the outcome of the merger of
SANDOZ and CIBA. Novartis is a 100 000 employees worldwide chemical
company focusing on healthcare, agribusiness and nutrition with a total
sales of around 35 000 Million Swiss Franks. The headquarters is based in
Basel, Switzerland, Europe.
I very much appreciate your attempt to standardize on a very small set of
fields to index any data. We have come several times across this problem
in the past and have found internal solutions to some of the problems.
Therefore I have two recommendations:
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.
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.
Regards
Armin Weltin
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