Dear all:
We, the DC community, have achieved quite "a little something"
(Winnie-the-Pooh) over the past weeks and months in putting out the
various WG Reports and RFCs. They clearly are milestones in the
development of DC on its way to maturity and greater stability.
However, since those documents were largely composed as separate
entities we need to concentrate on whether and how they complement
each other. In order to avoid inconsistencies we are perpetually in
need of finding out whether the whole is in sync with its parts.
Sigfrid has just raised an issue where this might not so easily be
the case. I want to take the opportunity and point you to another
area where we might be confronted with an another open question.
This question is: How do we deal with translations?
At present, there seems to be a strong tendency towards using the
Relation.IsBasedOn subelement for translations. Severel important
documents consistently are in favor of this approach.
See, for example, the Relations Working Group Report at
http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/wrelationdraft.html
Stu's DC-5 report at
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february98/02weibel.html
and RFC-1 at
http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/meta2/1998/02/0042.html
or its equivalent contents at
http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core_elements
But the situation gets more complicated when we take a look at RFC-3
(the P. Miller/T. Gill draft at
http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/lists/meta2/1998/02/0002.html)
or the Subelements WG Report (at:
http://purl.oclc.org/metadata/dublin_core/wsubelementdraft.html).
In these two documents, it is recommended to use the
Title.Alternative subelement for translations. This seems to be a
legacy of the Knight/Hamilton paper on DC qualifiers at
http://www.roads.lut.ac.uk/Metadata/DC-SubElements.html
In this paper, a whole lot of qualifiers are listed for TITLE: Main,
Long, Short, Alternative, Subtitle, PartTitle, Spine, Translated. And
it was at the subelement WG meeting in Helsinki that those elements
were lumped together into what since then has become known as the
subelement Title.Alternative. So, according to the Subelements WG
papers and policies, this category still contains translations and
thus causes perhaps another inconsistency in the application of DC.
So things could look like (regardless of syntax):
DC.Title Content: Vom Winde verweht
DC.Relation.IsBasedOn Content: Gone with the wind
Or, alternatively, the same translation could look like:
DC.Title Content: Gone with the wind
DC.Title.Alternative Content: Vom Winde verweht
I would propose that we rule out one of those two options and come up
with a clear guiding principle on translations (which may also be an
issue for the User Guide WG). Personally, I have no strong opinion on
this issue, and I could live with either way. But I think we should
not leave it open. In my eyes, we need a recommended best practice for
translations. Don't we?
Cheers,
Ralf
==========http://www2.sub.uni-goettingen.de============
Dr. Ralf Schimmer
Metadaten-Projekt
Niedersaechsische Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek
D-37070 Goettingen
Tel: +49 551 395230 / Fax: +49 551 393199
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