At 17:51 23/10/98 -0700, Liz Parrott wrote:
>
>I'm a programmer in Silicon Valley. Here "agent" means something very
>specific. It means a process a user creates to carry out a request either once
>or at regular intervals or under specific conditions. Sometimes it's called an
>intelligent agent. It's not unlike a Dialog Alert.
I's say that it's usually only a good idea to appropriate specialist
terminology like this when you can be fairly sure that there won't be any
kind of interference effect between the two fields of discourse concerned,
i.e. in this case, if those for whom an agent is a piece of software are
unlikely to have to deal with those for whom an agent is a category of
information. It seems to me highly unlikely that these sets of language
users are disjoint, as witness Ms Parrott's interesting comment cited above.
Without wishing to take sides on whether or not Bearman's proposal is a good
one, I'd strongly support renaming the proposed unified field to avoid this
confusion. Far better, in my view, to appropriate a term from the library
community, where most of these categories seem equivalent to the AACR
concept of "statement of responsibility". So why not call this field
"Responsible"?
(anyone who spots in this an attempt to get the TEI Header's <respStmt>
into the Dublin core, is dead right)
Lou Burnard
>From the Laptop at Burnard Towers
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