When looking to the statistics on the META NAMEs used on the WWW, presented
by vancouvert-webpages.com at
http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/bycount.shtml
I wonder why dublin core entities should be named "dc.entityname" and not
simply "entityname", dc beeing supposed to be used by default. An entity
name like "dc.description" is not natural: nobody will use it if he does not
know DC.
In order to be understood by everybody, should we whrite the following on
each page?:
<META NAME ="object-type" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="dc.type" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="function-type" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="document_type" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="objecttype" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="resource-type" content="Journal">
<META NAME ="vw96.objecttype" content="Journal">
<http-equiv ="resource-type" content="Journal">
<http-equiv ="index-type" content="Journal">
(...)
<and the same for each entity such as "description", "keywords" etc.>
Or wouldn't it be easier to agree on the most used entity names
("description", "keywords", "author") as DC standard entity names (to be
used by default on the WWW), giving the possibility to anybody to add or use
other entities by specifying the scheme and the language if they want
specific properties for the content.
In the example bellow:
<meta name="keywords" scheme="GEMET" [language="en"] content ="transport,
spatial mobility">
the tag can be indexed by the robot, even if it does not know GEMET (which
is a multilingual polyhierarchical thesaurus used for specific information
systems). But if it knows GEMET, then it can use the full functionalities of
the thesaurus (case of a robot dedicated to a specific public 'intranet').
Of course, one could argue that each robot could translate the entity names,
recognising "object-type" as synonym of "dc.type", "function-type",
"document_type", "objecttype", "resource-type", "vw96.objecttype",
"index-type" etc. But can we ask them that?
Bruno Kestemont
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