Thanks for this Stu. I'm not familiar with vCard or the LoC Name Card
authority (giving the game away that I'm not from a library or information
science background) - do you have any URLs that I can get to to find out
more? I'm certainly happy to promote standard ways of describing material.
BTW, is the whole DC.Creator.PersonalName.Address a kludge? This is what I
thought DC Qualified was likely to suggest for personal addresses. Or would
STM.Affiliation be a kludge? Or STM.Creator.PersonalName.Affiliation? Are
they all kludges without defined schemes, or do they vary in kludginess?
Presumably, whatever set we come up with has to allow a degree of
optionality re granularity too. That is, as a content processor, I would
want to have the option of defining affiliation as one undifferentiated
address (e.g. STM.Affiliation = "John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Baffins Lane,
Chichester, West Sussex PO19 1UD, UK") or differentiated in more detail (e.
g. identifying name of company, street, town, county, postcode, country).
We know from the SGMLing of our journal headers that fine granularity comes
at a cost (in content analysis and tagging) which we would want the option
of incurring or not, depending on the usual cost-benefit comparisons. This
is a commercial decision, of course.
Cliff
[log in to unmask] on 15/09/98 12:45:47
Please respond to [log in to unmask]
To: Cliff Morgan/Chichester/Wiley, [log in to unmask]
cc:
Subject: Re: Q: target group?
[log in to unmask] wrote, among other things:
> >In STM journals, we are likely to regard an author's affiliation as
> significant metadata.
> Dublin Core has specifically stated that affiliation is *not* to be
> regarded as equivalent to
> DC.Creator.PersonalName.Address (since this is the author's personal
> address, not his or her
> place of work), and suggested that this tag should be dealt with as a
> local extension. (I am lobbying for an authoritative body such as the
> International STM
> group to endorse a set of local extensions optimised for STM journals.)
There is clearly a need for structured affiliation information, contact
information, and address information associated with agents such as
Creator, Contributor, Publisher. The 'dot syntax' in the above example is
a META-tag kludge that will not serve us well in the long run. One current
discussion in the Data Model group is to adopt an acceptable structure from
elsewhere and promote its adoption. vCard is one such example, promoted by
the Internet Mail Consortium as well-structured information about people...
a virtual business card. Another alternative is the Library of Congress
Name Authority structure, which has a somewhat different orientation, but
also represents a structured agent record.
I urge Cliff to look at these options to see whether either meets the
needs of the STM community and report back to us. If not, an additional
community-based proposal would certainly be in order.
stu
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