David
Forgive me if this seems naive but aren't custody/ownership and other
questions relation to provenance more properly the domain of
recordkeeping metadata, and nothing per se to do with discovery
metadata? Aren't you trying to get DC to do a lot more than was
originally intended?
Andrew Wilson
National Archives of Australia
Email: [log in to unmask]
Ph: +61 2 6212 3694
Fax: + 61 2 6212 3997
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [log in to unmask]
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of David Bearman
> Sent: Friday, 22 January 1999 4:20
> To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Bearman paper... Relations
>
>
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.archimuse.com
>
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