On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Simon Cox wrote:
> Andy - I share your concerns about
> (a) the absolute necessity or usefulness of a type indicator for the value of any element
> (b) casual additions to the implied datamodel
> (c) special treatment for the CCP elements
>
> However,
> (a) the CCP working group and many many implementors have consistently
> requested that this facility be provided, and many existing
> implementations kludge it anyway, so this is an argument that is
> already over - DCMES credibility is on the line if we duck this
I agree that there is a 'requirement' here... but I don't agree that there
is a requirement to implement 'agent-type' in the way we appear to be
implementing it.
> (b) this really is not such a casual addition - the concept that the
> resource-being-pointed-to will have a known "type" is nothing new -
> exactly where this info is to be stored is an issue, but the notion of
> typed-entities is clear
Sure.
> (c) I made the case for why special treatment in this case is not a
> risk in the comments along with the proposal. Look at it as the first
> example of more general resource typing.
OK. If I look at it that way then I'd say that we are taking the wrong
approach with agent typing... therefore we are likely to take the wrong
approach with general resource typing! :-)
> I don't understand your reference to HTML - as far as I can see this
> issue is really not one of any particular syntax, though HTML cannot
> handle it elegantly, for sure.
In describing a Resource-A that has a Creator-B we have two things to
describe - therefore we should have two spearate, but related,
descriptions. The '(resource) type' of Resource-A should be part of the
description of Resource-A. The '(agent) type' of Creator-B should be part
of the description of Creator-B.
The current discussion seems to be based on the premise that it is somehow
useful and necessary to indicate the '(agent) type' of Creator-B as part
of the description of Resource-A. I think this is fundamentally wrong.
I refer to HTML because, looking back on the development of DC, our
perceived requirement for indicating the type of Creator-B in the
description of Resource-A comes from the use of META tags like
<meta name="Creator.PersonalName" content="Andy Powell">
by various implementations. Why did people start doing this? Because in
HTML META tags, there is very little else you can do! It's a kludge. Do
we really want to base our qualifier principles and data-model on a
kludge?!
Andy.
> Andy Powell wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Simon Cox wrote:
> >
> > > As discussed in Tuesday conf. call, here's a revised proposal for a
> > > third category to be added to the "Principles" document:
> > >
> > > ==========
> > > 3. Agent-type. These qualifiers specify the type of the entity which is
> > > identified by a value of the Creator, Contributor, Publisher elements (CCP).
> > > This is typically a person, organisation, instrument, or other entity
> > > capable of creative acts or control of real or intellectual property.
> > > While this type is a property of another resource (given by the value of
> > > the CCP element), it is considered useful for discovery of the present
> > > resource (i.e. that one which is the subject of the DCMES description)
> > > by many communities. If a value qualified with an Agent-type is encountered
> > > by a client that does not support this category of qualifier, it can be
> > > ignored without harming the client application. The definition of
> > > each Agent-type must be clear and publicly available.
> >
> > I strongly disagree with this special treatment of the 'agent' elements.
> >
> > *If* there were a real requirement to indicate the type of the related
> > object (party) identified by the Creator, Contributor and Publisher
> > elements and, *if* we choose to alter the data-model to allow for this,
> > then we should also allow a similar mechanism for Relation and Source.
> > I.e. the data-model should allow us to indicate the type of the related
> > resource identified by the Relation and Source elements.
> >
> > However, I don't believe that there is a real requirement for this (though
> > I think that there may be a perceived requirement because of the
> > limitations of HTML META tags).
> >
> > Information about the type of a related 'resource', whether it is a
> > related person, organisation, text, image or whatever, belongs in the
> > description of that relation resource.
> >
> > Adding this category to the principles document implies an addition to the
> > data-model that we are not ready to make. Please don't do this!
>
> --
> Best Simon
Andy
--
Distributed Systems and Services
UK Office for Library and Information Networking
University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Voice: +44 1225 323933
www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell Fax: +44 1225 826838
Resource Discovery Network - www.rdn.ac.uk
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
