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UNCLASSIFIED Hi Pete and Tom I agree with what you say about purpose, and that we shouldn't be defining new properties for new purposes but it comes down to the definitions of properties as to whether they are suitable for different purposes. Dcterms:type is defined as "The nature or genre of the resource". Clearly the accessibility terms are not about "genre" (well its clear to me!) but what does 'nature' mean? If its to do with the essential or innate characteristics of a resource then the accessibility terms, as Gottfried views them, don't quite fit with this aspect of the definition either. Because the accessibility community (as represenetd by Liddy and Gottfried) see the terms as being advisory/warning in nature rather than classificatory I think that justifies the creation of a new property. Classification is quite different from advising/warning and I don't see how the semantics of type could accommodate both. Cheers Andrew -----Original Message----- From: A mailing list for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative's Usage Board [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Pete Johnston Sent: Friday, 24 April 2009 9:56 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Range of "accessibility" property [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] Hi Andrew, > Thanks for all your thoughtful contributions to this discussion. I'm > not sure if there is much difference except in purpose - the purposes > of each property are quite different. Yes, understood. And I'm sort of pursuing this point because I think it kinda gets at (what I feel is) one of the underlying problems here: the purpose - the "why" - is important in determining what we want to say about the world, in selecting/designing terms (properties, classes, VES, SES), but the terms themselves should reflect that "what we want to say". It's quite possible that a single piece of information may be used for two different purposes e.g. knowing something about the format of a resource may be helpful to me when I'm searching for resources and selecting from between two similar resources on the one hand (say, I want mp3 rather than Ogg Vorbis cos I can only play mp3 on my portable player) and that same piece of information may be useful to someone migrating resources for preservation purposes or doing statistical studies of the different formats used or for some other purpose that wasn't even considered when the term was designed. But (at the risk of stating the obvious) it doesn't mean we need to coin a new set of properties for each new purpose. Having said that, I'm not going as far as to say that all the accessibility requirements could/should be met by coining a new "type vocabulary". Pete --- Pete Johnston Technical Researcher, Eduserv [log in to unmask] +44 (0)1225 474323 http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/people/petejohnston/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ UNCLASSIFIED