I hate to dive into the middle of a discussion we've raked over the coals
more than once, but I was reminded of one question that I felt was never
really answered in the whole debate. I give you the following hypothetical
situation:
There is a live newscast (a video) which is saved in various forms. First,
it is saved as a video (say in Quicktime format), and put on a website.
Then, for users with slower modem, it is saved in audio only (say,
RealAudio). Finally, for those who want a printed, text version,
transcripts are also available--one in HTML on a webpage, and one in ascii
text. The television station that made the newscast puts all of these
resources online (what a great site that would be!) for the general public,
and wants them to be freely accessible to the public, so it wants to create
meta-data for these files.
What should it do? Currently, according to the standards being developed,
the following resource types would have to be used:
(Minimalist)
Text (for both transcripts)
Image (for the video)
Audio (for the audio version)
(Structuralist)
Text.Manuscript (for both transcripts)
Image.Moving.Film (for the video)
Sound.Narration (for sound)
Do you see my problem here? We are simultaneously forcing certain
documents into specific media (ie, *any* kind of video not an animation
automatically becomes a "film") while allowing *very*, I would argue *too*
subject-ish resource types (such as text.Advertisement). While I admire
the attempt to divide things into a neat hierarchy based on a majority of
its content, this can be very limiting. What if I am looking for a
graphical/picture based advertisement (most are, these days)? What if I am
looking specifically for a document containing the content of a television
show but don't care if it's in video, audio, or textual form?
Perhaps I just don't correctly understand *what* a resource type is
supposed to be, but it seems to me the dilemma is one of separating FORM
from CONTENT. I think that if there is already an indicator describing a
document's medium and its file type (ie medium="video" and
filetype="quicktime"), there is not a real need to indicate that it falls
under the video category *unless* its subjective nature *is* a
film/movie/etc., ie "Star Wars". And even then, there should be some clear
line of relationship between "Star Wars" the film and "Star Wars" the movie
script and "Star Wars" the book.
I think *either* we should base resource types *completely* on form (in
which case such documents as Advertisment, Promotional, and TechReport are
out) or *completely* on "what kind of document is it? what sort of kind of
information does it cover?" in which case most of the heirarchy set up
already just doesn't work.
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[ Jordan Reiter ]
[ mailto:[log in to unmask] ]
[ "Don't you realize that intellectual people ]
[ are all ignorant because they can't spray ]
[ paint that small?" ]
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