At first blush, and from the outside of the committee who worked on this
(and thus with all the dangers of second-guessing), I want to express
some dislike of the proposal to dismiss Creator, Publisher and
Contributor. I think I see two grounds:
1) Generality should prevail, not exception: Creator (author) and
publisher will cover the greatest number of contributions to the web by
far for some time, and they are familiar and readily comprehensible
concepts to users and creators. DC is not, I think, intended to be a
perfect solution, but one that retains some ideas of simplicity and
ready usefulness. By defining it to deal with the least likely
possibilities rather than the most likely, we depart from that mode.
2) Parsimony should prevail, not complexity: In the later part of the
proposal that David sent we are led right back around to extensive
"role" definitions if we wish to make any distinctions between "agent"
possibilities. I submit that we very readily might want in most cases
to be able to distinguish by Creator, and very often indeed by the
disseminating organization (Publisher). If the DC markup only indicates
"agent" (the easy way out for many who might not wish to do very much
work on this) we lose distinction capability; if the "agent" role is
qualified by a whole list of possibilities we gain distinction at the
loss of simplicity.
What suggests itself is opening up the existing "Contributor" definition
to include more roles than we first thought, leaving the deeply
understood concepts of authorship and publishership to deal with the
great majority of cases. This of course simplifies the implementation
problem, but that's necessarily a dependent variable not a determinant.
--pg
David Bearman wrote:
> [...]
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Peter Graham Syracuse University Library [log in to unmask]
Syracuse, NY 13244-2010 315/443-2573 fax 315/443-2060 9/98nw4.4
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