It sounds as though the original user guide had it almost right.
Repeating the field for multiple occurrences is much, much cleaner, in
that it does not conflict with the practice of whatever scheme is used
to formulate the content of the field. This is absolutely critical if
you want various user communities to be able to map accurately into and
out of the Dublin Core. Once you get take into account the element name,
type, language, and scheme, the form of the content should be entirely
described. If you superimpose a Dublin Core "delimiter" within that
content, I believe you are asking for trouble.
Robin Wendler ........................ work (617) 495-3724
Office for Information Systems ....... fax (617) 495-0491
Harvard University Library ........... [log in to unmask]
Cambridge, MA, USA 02138 .............
On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, John A. Kunze wrote:
> > From: "Weibel,Stu" <[log in to unmask]>
> > Would someone volunteer to write a Recommended Best Practice note for
> > delimiting multiple values in a an element field?
>
> Remember the old user guide, now rather out of date?
> It described a semi-colon convention that
>
> (a) equated repeated values with repeated element assignment statements,
> (b) applied to all elements, and
> (c) defined a quoting mechanism for including literal semi-colons as data.
>
> To paraphrase in modern parlance the Sept 1996 draft:
> = Any metadata element may be omitted or repeated. As a shorthand for
> = repeated elements, one element can share its name part with a second
> = element by appending a `;' (semi-colon) and the content of the second
> = to the content of the first. So the first two lines below are
> = equivalent to the third line.
> =
> = <META name="DC.Creator" content="Marx, K">
> = <META name="DC.Creator" content="Engels, F">
> = <META name="DC.Creator" content="Marx, K; Engels, F">
> =
> = Use a backslash, as in ``\;'', if you want to include a literal
> = semi-colon in the content. To include a literal double-quote (`"') in
> = this metadata [HTML] notation, write it as %22. Within a descriptive
> = record, element order has no shared meaning, but for repeated elements
> = the relative order (e.g., among multiple creators) should be preserved
> = by display software.
>
> -John
>
>
|