Greetings,
I'm with the Gateway to Educational Materials project, sponsored by the
U.S. Department of Education and the National Library of Education. I met
many of you at the meeting in Helsinki.
This is good news, and I agree whole-heartedly with Stu. It will be
reassuring to us and the organizations that we're asking to participate in
our project to see the Dublin Core formally standardized at the element
level. Whether it's true or not, there is a perception of instability.
Niso standardization will help.
Thanks,
Nancy
Nancy A. Morgan, GEM Coordinator
[log in to unmask]
http://geminfo.org
==============================================
Gateway to Educational Materials
ERIC Clearinghouse on Information & Technology
4-194 Center for Science & Technology
Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y. 13244-4100
(315) 443-3640 FAX (315) 443-5448
==============================================
On Wed, 14 Jan 1998, Weibel,Stu wrote:
> In an ideal world we might wait longer before initiating
> standardization, but I think we must balance the cost of not acting
> against the cost of acting. My own view is that there is FAR more
> pressure to stabilize DC (communities saying, in effect, if you don't
> stabilize, we will proceed down our own path) than there is resistance
> to deployment because some of the details are not perfect.
>
> In the IETF world, conformance testing is trivial: the bits get from
> point A to point B, C, D, and E, or they don't (of course, I
> oversimplify). It is an interesting question, in the metadata world,
> when we would say we have interoperability and when we don't. In the
> world's largest deployed metadata system (MARC Cataloging), there are
> many inconsistencies and shortcomings, but it nonetheless is useful. We
> try to deal with the problems, but never with the expectation of
> perfection.
>
> We should take comfort from this example of imperfect usefulness and
> forge ahead decisively. Not to say that we cannot, in parallel, study
> the effectiveness and interoperability of DC and improve it.
>
>
> On Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:20 AM, Jon Knight
> [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Weibel,Stu wrote:
> > > In related developments, NISO has approached us about standardizing
> the
> > > DC, and I'm of the opinion this would be a strong asset for our
> > > community. While NISO is a national standards organization, rather
> than
> > > an international one, it is a reasonable place to get our feet wet
> in
> > > the formal standardization process.
> >
> > Before DC is formally standardised, shouldn't we have some more
> extensive
> > deployment and interoperability testing first? I'm from the old IETF
> > school of "running code and rough consensus" rather than the old ISO
> > "standardise then think about implementing". No point in going
> through
> > the formal standards process with something that we later find to be
> full
> > of holes (not that I think DC is you understand). At least wait until
> the
> > Helsinki break out groups all report back with the various details and
> see
> > how the whole thing hangs together before passing the DC to NISO, or
> any
> > other standards body, for consideration.
> >
> > 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. *
>
|