I hope the following is closer to the mark... My apologies for confusing
the issue.
Please criticise. Also... this does not solve the issue of what the
short list of RelationTypes might be for DC-Simple. Please propose.
stu
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I. Relation Semantics:
The Relation element specifies the relationship between the present
resource and a target resource, and can be thought of as two entities
connected by an arc, the arc being a named relationship.
The present resource is unambiguously identifiable as the resource with
which the metadata is associated (identified in the Identifier element).
The target resource should be unambiguously defined by a globally-unique
identifier (one of any of several varieties in common usage: ISBN, URI,
whatever).
The named relationship should be selected from a default Dublin Core
enumberated list of relation types or from a scheme-specified enumerated
list of types.
II. Deployment Issues:
There are three situations that are likely to be encountered in the use
of Relation metadata
A. One to One
exactly one RelationType is specified
exactly one RelationTarget is specified
B. One to Many
exactly one RelationType is specified
more than one RelationTarget is specified
C. Many to One
more than one RelationType is specified
exactly one RelationTarget is specified
D Many to Many
more than one RelationType is specified
more than one RelationTarget is specified
Cases A, B, and C can be accomodated unambiguously in HTML; the
occurance of any RelationTarget can be inferred to be of the type
specified in the single RelationType content attribute or the occurence
of any of several RelationTypes can be inferred to refer to the single
RelationTarget .
Case D cannot be accomodated in HTML because of the lack of a grouping
mechanism. This is a limitation that cannot be overcome without further
conventions that are unlikely to be elegant. Thus, this last case
should be deployed only in a richer metadata infrastructure such as that
expected in RDF.
