The Dublin Core Home Page (http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core) is the
official home of the Dublin Core and will remain so.  Gary's obvious
frustration with the problems of getting up-to-date information reflects
in part the fact that we (Eric and I) have not invested  enough effort
in keeping it up to date.  Partly as a result of his justified
frustration, we are reorganizing it and bringing it up to date.  A new
version will be in place today (criticisms and suggestions welcome).
Beth Marsh here at OCLC is joining the DC team to address this problem
and we welcome the assistance of others as well (adopt a page now!).  

One of the problems we have had all along is the lack of a good way to
record consensus about certain issues so that we can avoid the
return-to-square-one problem, as well as to allow for graceful evolution
as we judge where change is necessary.  

We all know that the mailing list archive is a lousy way to do this.  I
propose that as discrete issues emerge in list discussions, a
knowledgeable stakeholder adopt the issue, prepare a brief statement of
the problem, and summarize the consensus with an outline of the
reasoning by which the group arrived at the consensus.  These issues can
be registered under the home page as working papers (perhaps with an ID)
and will form the public building blocks of the consensus.

This has already worked well for things like DATE (Misha's ISO-8601
profile) and seems to be the nature of what Roy Tenent is trying to do
with TYPE, Mary Laarsgard is doing for COVERAGE, and Tom Baker is doing
on the LANGUAGE  issue.

My apologies for the lousy job we've done to date with the home page.
We'll try and do better.  Help us with constructive criticism of the new
materials.

stu







On Tuesday, September 23, 1997 12:14 PM, Gary Malet
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> > 
> > I thought we had just about exhausted the Resource Type discussion
> several 
> > months ago, but lo and behold, it has surfaced again.
> > 
> > What concerns me is that we seem to have gone back to square one
again.
>  
> It would help to have an official homepage to advise the status of
each
> element. 
> I understand that Jon will provide this. Perhaps the documentation for
the
> elements
> and sub-elements should start with a "mission statement".  This will
guide
> us as we attempt to 
> have our syntax conform to the mission of DC. This is particularly
> important because we 
> are using mailing lists and collaborative efforts to accomplish our
own
> goals. 
> 
> If the mission is, in part, that the elements are understandable for
> inexperienced
> distributed cataloguers I would recommend that we not use
"environment".
> Interactive is better. We need to implement this as a pick list.   
> 
> > One last plea - please let us move on and not spend the next twelve
> months
> > racing around in circles chasing our tails!  We need a solution we
can
> use
> > now!
> 
> Agreed.
> 
>
************************************************************************
***
> * 
>       Dr.Gary Malet,  NLM Medical Informatics Fellow, Family Physician
>                     Oregon Health Sciences University
>            3181 S.W. Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland, Oregon
>                    [log in to unmask], (503)494-6734
>                  Co Chair AMIA's Internet Working Group,
>         http://www-informatics.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/Amia/homepage.htm
>     "MEDICAL MATRIX"- Hypertext Internet Clinical Medicine Resources
>                     http://www.slackinc.com/matrix
>
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****
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>