Dear Robin,
Let me see if I can answer your questions about the relations we proposed
in the January d-lib article
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/bearman/01bearman.html
For background, as you know after the Helsinki meeting the Relations
Working group proposed five reciprocal relations:
- References / Is Referenced By (to point to other information resources)
- IsBasedOn / IsBasisFor (to express intellectual derivation)
- IsVersionOf / HasVersion (to express historical evolution)
- Is Format Of / Has Format (to identify transformations of media or layout)
- Is Part of / Has Part (to record Part/Whole)
In the discussion with INDECS/DOI and the further development of the
XML/RDF model, as reported in this article, we found several other
relations which we felt would be needed.
1) The first of these was "Is".
You asked:
>Isn't Relation dyadic, or at the very least, not monadic? Shouldn't a
>relationship "between information resources" require something on either
side >of the relation type operand? Establishing the
>Relation type "Is" to denote that the information resource is original
seems a >bit twee.
Yes. "Is" is dyadic. I suppose we should have written it "Is/Is". The need
has been recognized implicitly since Warwick, since multiple metadata
authors might create metadata about the same resource, and each might want
to point to each others metadata. We didn't expect a metadata record to
point to itself, but to another metadata record purporting to describe the
same thing. As for twee, I don't understand....
2) The next of these relations was IsMetadataAuthorOf/HasMetadataAuthor.
We recognize that while some metadata records will be created by the
authors of the information resource they describe, most will be created by
others such as librarians, publishers, database creators etc. and that the
authenticity of the metadata is crucial to assessing it (see:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/06bearman.html for extensive discussion of
the rationale).
You asked:
>IsMetadataAuthorOf/HasMetadataAuthor, IsOwnerOf/HasOwner -- Aren't
>these agent roles rather than relationship types? If information
>resources and agents are indistinguishable and what is proposed here
>are appropriately new relation types, then we need a heck of lot
>of other relations (e.g., IsAuthorOf, IsEditorOf, IsTranslatorOf,
>Donated, WasKeyGripFor, SangInTheShower, etc.) What did you authors
>intend by adding just these two (or four) relation types?
The value of the "creator" element (whether or not DC accepts my proposal
regarding Agents) is the creator of the information resource, not the
creator of the metadata. Assuming we have a creator-type (or better yet, an
Agent-type) that points to a role vocabulary, we would be selecting roles
to describe the relation between the named agent/creator and the resource,
not between the named agent/creator and the metadata.
I suspect that what you are stumbling over here is something implicit, and
new, in the article. In the INDECS/DOI discussions, as we explained in our
use of the IFLA model, we ratified the fact that DC metadata is about the
'stuff'. What is implicit is that there is other metadata about
people/organizations, deals/agreements, vocabularies/schemas, etc. which is
not described by DC. But it is linked to stuff...
This is relevant to the question of IsOwnerOf/Has/Owner. The DC elements
per se don't say anything about custody or ownership (and I now see I've
allowed both of these to get confused in my definition, so we'll need to
clarify it further in any pre DC2.0 discussion). What this relation
suggests is that pointing to metadata records about the person/organization
which hold/own the information resource will be necessary for many purposes.
3) Finally, you asked:
>IsMetadataFor/HasMetadata seems to be an explicit (and explicitly desired)
>type of relation between information resources not proposed here.
This I don't think I understand. The metadata record is the metadata for
the information resource. Maybe what you are suggesting here is the same
thing we meant by what we'll now call - Is/Is?
Thanks for pushing this. There's lots of work to do, some of which I hope
will go on in the scheme Harmonization working group, before the DC2.0
relations are all fully defined. What we're trying to do here is make sure
that the elements, types and schemes we have in common are shared across
all the communities that want to use them.
David
David Bearman
President
Archives & Museum Informatics
2008 Murray Ave, Suite D
Pittsburgh, PA 15217 USA
Phone: +1 412 422 8530
Fax: +1 412 422 8594
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http://www.archimuse.com
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