On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, Dan Brickley wrote:
> What about CVs though? For my sins I'm involved with a project
> that will include a database of both CVs and job adverts for Social
> Science researchers. On the face of it these are both classic DLOs, but
> the former is also straying into white-pages territory.
Ah but the difference is that you're generating metadata for a CV
object which _is_ a DLO, rather than metadata about a human object which
isn't a DLO (it doesn't have an author, subject, etc, though I guess if
you were being perverse you could say that parents are authors of
children - I wouldn't recommend it though!). Similarly you can easily fit
DC metadata to biographies of people, but its not a good fit for the
people themselves.
> This is a specific case of a general problem: for more or less any
> non-DLO (people, jobs, houses, museum artifacts, databases, whatever...)
> it is often useful to have a DLO describing that resource. (eg. CVs,
> job description, catalogue records, photographs of artifacts). And once
> we've got a class of DLOs for talking about that kind of non-DLO, there's
> a need to represent them in Dublin Core. Which is maybe why people
> sometimes seem to be using DC for everything...
I agree that there's a need to represent the metadata of the DLOs in
Dublin Core; that's what DC is all about after all. However I disagree
with using DC to represent metadata for non-DLOs, even if those non-DLOs
have DLOs that talk about them. A GIS or a genome database, etc doesn't
sound much like a DLO to me and so shouldn't have DC for it. However a
manual page describing how to use the database should be covered by DC and
indeed is; it would have a resource type along the lines of
DOCUMENT.manual (modified to suit whatever syntax we eventually end up
with).
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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