Mary Larsgaard forwarded me the message from Misha Wolf recommending the
the DC Subject be qualifiable by SubjectType. I'd like to comment on
this. I'm not yet a member of this listserv but am in the process of
signing up.
We, at Alexandria Digital Library, have just done something similar to
this in our implementation of version 2 of the FGDC Content Standard.
Our schema uses "keyword_type" as an attribute of "keyword" to code the
various types of keywords specified in the FGDC Standard: theme, place,
temporal, and stratum. So, DC might also consider going in the same
direction as recommended.
However, how such a qualification approach would be implemented is of
some concern because it might be confusing to have one DC metadata
creator declaring "currencies" as a SubjectType while another simply
treats "currencies" as a topic or theme - part of the terms in a
particular subject heading list or thesaurus, with particular currencies
as narrower terms of the "currencies" term. Yet another DC user might
have a "currencies" Scheme to add to the confusion ["currencies" used
for illustration only]
Re his example of the Eurovision song contest: I think the appropriate
"location" descriptor here is the topic/theme "European Music Awards"
and "Israeli Singers" or some such descriptors rather than a descriptor
of either "Europe" or "Israel". It would be a mistake to have the DC
Coverage categories of Time or Place as qualifiers of Subject, I think -
this would really confuse people with the present approach to these
attributes. UNLESS Coverage is restricted to coordinate and date
representations of Coverage only and the home for textual descriptions
of time and place is DC Subject. [My apologies if this is a
long-discussed and already-decided issue. I haven't been following the
discussions].
- Linda Hill
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