I was reading over the report from the 6/8 DCAM telecon and there was one discussion in particular that struck me and I think might be worth a bit more thought.
Surrounding the discussion about the ISBD example and integrating SESes into DCAM, Antoine made this statement:
"Antoine: RDF is about encoding as little information in the string as
possible. That's why datatypes are not used much. I don't think DCAM should
have a different approach."
Followed a little later with this from Karen:
"Karen: In every case where you have multiple things, but the whole can repeat.
You can have multiple titles with multiple subtitles. A lot of this stuff goes
away when we use identifiers for things, but not all. A lot of what we have
should be replaced with URIs."
I think both of these points are very interesting from the perspective of how DCAM might contribute to a best practices for metadata in use. We obviously need to consider the manipulation and ultimately conversion of legacy data but I think we should also be designing the DCAM toward a best practices approach as well.
To that end, I'd be interested in hearing what others think about attempting to limit a reliance on strings in our DCAM design patterns in favor of URIs or other flavors of identifiers.
FWIW, I am in agreement with Antoine here.
Aaron
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