Consider a DC-savvy search interface which allows me to enter, against
the field Contributor, the search string:
Chris Smith Illustrator
A typical search engine will return all DC records where the Contributor
field contains any of "Chris", "Smith" and "Illustrator". That leaves us
with a few questions:
1. How to retrieve only Chris Smith and not Chris Butcher?
2. How to retrieve only those records where Chris Smith is the
illustrator.
An AltaVista-like syntax for that sort of query is:
+"Chris Smith" +Illustrator
That leaves the more general issue of "Chris Smith" vs "Smith Chris" (of
which "Smith, Chris" is a special case), which I won't tackle here.
Hence, I stay with:
<meta name="DC.contributor.name" content="Chris Smith">
<meta name="DC.contributor.role" content="Illustrator">
<meta name="DC.contributor.affiliation" content="United Illustrators">
or:
<contributor>
<name>Chris Smith</name>
<role>Illustrator</role>
<affiliation>United Illustrators</affiliation>
</contributor>
The other approach proposed just doesn't scale. It was:
<meta name="DC.contributor.illustrator" content="Chris Smith">
This would lead to things like:
<meta name="DC.contributor.conductor" content="...">
<meta name="DC.contributor.leadViolin" content="...">
<meta name="DC.contributor.piano" content="...">
<meta name="DC.contributor.vocals" content="...">
<meta name="DC.contributor..." content="...">
And I thought we were trying to keep down the number of sub-elements!
Incidentally, this approach also causes i18n problems. Recall, that Tom
Baker argued at DC4 that different cultures have subtly different
boundaries between activities. These "job titles" should be sub-element
*values*, not sub-element *names*.
It should not be necessary to invent a dozen new sub-elements every time
we wish to describe the contributors to an additional field of human
endeavour, eg:
- musical performances
- dance performances
- theatre
- heart surgery
- law
- film
- ...
Labels such as "producer", "director", "anaesthetist", "choreographer",
"judge" should be treated as values, not containers. Maybe values from
a finite list, but values all the same.
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Misha Wolf Email: [log in to unmask] 85 Fleet Street
Standards Manager Voice: +44 171 542 6722 London EC4P 4AJ
Reuters Limited Fax : +44 171 542 8314 UK
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Fifth DC Metadata Workshop, 6-8 Oct 1997, linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/DC5.html
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