In all seriousness...
If we're going to combine three fields into one (in the DC Qualified context),
and we're then going to have a big debate about what we're going to *call* the
field... why don't we refer to each of the fields as "DC2.1", "DC2.2", "DC2.3",
etc.
Then we can have a "dictionary" for, say, English (unfortunately, I'm only
mono-lingual):
----
DC2.1 - Document Name
This will be the title of the book or paper, the name of a movie, the title of a
painting or sound track.
eg: <META NAME="DC2.1" LANG="en" CONTENT="My life as a dog">
DC2.2 - Contributing Entities
A list of entities which have contributed to the intellectual or artistic
content, with a qualification indicating their roles in the production of this
resource. For example, the "creator" role could be owned by an electronic
telescope and the "web-publisher" role could be owned by the webmaster
publishing the astronomical photos on the Internet.
Since all the "three field or one" issues will mean nothing after a user
interface has been developed for a metadata-based search engine, will we really
have a need to worry about the *names* of the fields? It doesn't matter to a
piece of software whether the field name is "Title" or "Field 1".
----
As for a "dictionary" of keywords... well... howabout we get a list of common
words (say... we already have a few dictionaries to pick from at
http://www.lub.lu.se/metadata/subject-help.html). Then convert that list to
different languages, giving us a common foundation set of keywords. The hard
part will be writing the definition for each keyword... in every different
language. Using the native-language dictionary (eg: Oxford) isn't good enough -
since that will tell you what the word means, not what the word means when used
as a keyword. Anyway... enough babble.
Just some food for thought.
Alex Satrapa
Mike Collett wrote:
> If we really must go ahead and merge these three fields in DC Simple, let's
> at
> >least call it "DC 2" or "DC1998".
>
> I have to agree that altering the basic syntax of DC should only be done as
> a clear change to the DC version after as many changes as are thought
> necessary have been aired and agreed.
[snip]
> I believe attention should be focussed upon promoting large scale
> implementations DC and in sorting out multilingual vocabulary and key words
> for the current version before any major public alterations in basic syntax.
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