Hi Dan,
I was being sarcastic in saying "will always be up-to-date". In fact I
think it is highly unlikely that metadata will be kept up-to-date because
of the investment required. However, if it is not up-to-date, how valuable
is it?
In HealthInsite we link to a lot of consumer health fact sheets on
different partner sites. These are often reviewed and updated. We have to
regularly remind our partners to put clear dates on their fact sheets and
to make sure these match their metadata dates - the selection of the date
is a manual process; it cannot be automated because a computer will not
know if a change to a page is something trivial or a genuine update. With
any manual process, there is a risk of error or omission. We have made a
considerable investment in developing a metadata workflow that reduces
errors. Other organisations around the world might not be willing to make
this level of investment.
I agree with you that there were problems with extending the DC dot model -
your example is very messy. However we do not need these sort of
extensions.
Finally, we have no idea if anyone else is using our metadata or the
metadata that is embedded in the pages of our partner sites. No one has
written to enquire about using it, or to complain that it does not suit
their needs.
Cheers, Prue
[log in to unmask]
Dan
Brickley
<danbri@DAN To
BRI.ORG> [log in to unmask]
Sent by: cc
General
DCMI Subject
discussion Re: DC and legacy implementations
list [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]
<DC-GENERAL
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03/12/2008
11:38 AM
Please
respond to
Dan
Brickley
<danbri@DAN
BRI.ORG>
Prue Deacon wrote:
> There seems to be an assumption
> that, when the technical coding framework is in place, then everyone will
> create/maintain accurate, consistent metadata content and (hey presto!)
the
> Semantic Web will connect everybody to everything and will always be
> up-to-date.
I'm sorry you've got this impression re up-to-date, and I'd like to
track it down to source. Have people told you this, or written this, ...
or you're inferring it from other behavour and claims? Why on earth
would it always be up to date? Does anyone think this?
(Regarding "connect everybody to everything", we already are all
connected already, but enough of that for now...).
My sense of Semantic Web (and my motivation for the project) comes from
pretty much the opposite perspective. The fact that metadata is so
expensive to create and difficult to maintain is what motivates me to
try to make sure it can be as widely linked and re-used as possible. A
big aspect of the quality story is making sure the metadata is actually
used and human visible, which is why wiring it up to HTML formats (the
GRDDL and RDFa technologies) and to query systems (hence SPARQL) are
both important. RDF does come with some conceptual baggage for sure, but
well we never managed to define a non-RDF DC cleanly (including an
extension model --- dc.publisher.address-2.postcode etc ) that people
were happy with. I hope the boring/ugly bits of RDF (definition of
'literal' etc) can be swept under the carpet through better docs,
without leaving too many lumps...
cheers,
Dan
--
http://danbri.org/
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