Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> F.A. Roos writes
> > OK, yes, I see, for ranking and sorting. But if we refer to resource discovery on
> > the Web, the ranking in your AltaVista or HotBot or whatever search engine seems
> > rather different ...
> Yes, but also easy identification when looking at brief displays - i.e.
> the ability to create meaningful brief displays.
Then there's the idea that some creators might have contributed "more"
to a book. For example, if you have five authors, it's often the
practice to put the ring leader first, or just sort them in alphabetical
order. If one is a ring leader, you might end up with Smith, Jones,
Bloggs, White and Green credited as "Bloggs, Jones et al".
However, for a "brief display" based on DC metadata, you would probably
end up with "Bloggs, Green, Jones, Smith & White". Nothing too hard
there.
The difficulty comes if someone's trying to be "correct" in whatever the
contemporary interpretation of that term is, especially in reference to
great works of art. For example:
DC.Title = "Mona Lisa"
DC.Creator = "Da Vinci, Leonardo"
DC.Creator = "Capulet, Frederico" (a couple of creator records for
assistants who helped paint)
DC.Contributor = (a couple of assistants who mixed the paints, mounted
the canvas, etc)
Then you might end up with
1. Mona Lisa - oil on canvas
(Capulet & Da Vinci)
Which doesn't seem quite right, does it :) How fickle we humans are
when it comes to lists of people.
Is there any convenient way around this problem (order of importance of
creator elements)? Perhaps in your internal representation, you could
have an extra attribute indicating the "order" or "importance" of
particular repeats of fields. When you generate a DC representation in
some form (eg: embedded in HTML or RDF/XML), you may generate the list
of repeats in the order that implies importance.
I don't think we should modify the DC specification to allow for an
extra attribute or field name dot-extension. This makes the DC system
more complicated again.
If we can agree that order of presentation of repeated fields implies
order of importance, there's a happy medium. How you represent
sorting/importance order in your implementation is - to me - something
you keep to yourself, inside your system. Then it's up to you if you
want to interpret the order of the fields in my representation as
indicating some importance (unless they're obviously sorted
"alphabetically").
Does that sound fair?
Alex
--
Alex Satrapa
tSA Consulting Group Pty Ltd.
Canberra, Australia
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