At 06:50 PM 9/29/97 +0000, Misha Wolf wrote:
>The current version of Mary's Coverage paper (linked from the DC Web site)
>contains all of the following. So I'm puzzled about the suggestion for an
>unqualified DC.coverage element. What would it mean?
It would mean "Spatial and temporal intervals characteristic of
the resource's content" or whatever the current wording is. For example:
<coverage>19'th century France</coverage>
makes sense to me.
We are dealing with reducing the areas of ambiguity. The 15 elements
reduce some of the ambiguity associated with full-text indexing.
Qualifiers and subelements reduce it further. They don't eliminate it.
That doesn't mean they are not useful. Similarly, even though the
15 elements have more ambiguity, that doesn't mean they are useless
in an unqualified state. Full-text is loaded with ambiguity, but
I still find HotBot and AltaVista to be dammned useful.
Reducing ambiguity is a cost/benefit tradeoff.
If you want to spend the money in your cataloging to reduce the
ambiguity, great. If my lab has a bunch of resources to describe and not
a lot of money to do it (true story), they will not do as precise a job.
Requiring Qualifiers and subelements on things like Coverage is an
attempt to get me and the DOE to spend our money in a way that
makes you happy. While I am willing to buy you the occasional beer
at the bar, the DOE is unlikely to pay for more catalogers just
to make Reuters happy.
As a practical note, it is safest to assume that all elements
are free text unless they explicitly tell you otherwise. This is
because people may have the budget to spend 20 seconds on an element,
but not 120. It is up to you to deal with it. Sometimes
you will take extra pains to deal with those elements (Creator and
Title in particular). The rest of the time you may just toss the
element's text into a full-text "etc." field, or delete it. Your
choice, because its your money.
DC rules and Ron's corollaries:
1) All elements are optional, repeatable, and may occur in any order.
(This means I can delete and rearrange the elements that come into me
if I so feel like it)
2) All elements should be considered as free text unless qualified.
(This means that I can treat elements with unknown Qualifiers and
subelements as free text if I want to.)
</rant> :-)
Regards,
Ron Daniel Jr. voice:+1 505 665 0597
Advanced Computing Lab fax:+1 505 665 4939
MS B287 email:[log in to unmask]
Los Alamos National Lab http://www.acl.lanl.gov/~rdaniel
Los Alamos, NM, USA, 87545
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