Dear all,

In the flurry of mail before DC-8, Sigge put his finger on an important
issue (see below), which we should keep in mind as we address the
"architecture" of DCMI.  Rephrasing the issue in linguistic terms, the
question is whether:

    1) qualifiers are adjectives modifying nouns
       -- adjectives that can simply be ignored by "dumbing down" a
       statement to just the unmodified noun (i.e., unqualified
       element); or

    2) qualifiers-plus-elements are modified nouns -- inseparable noun-
       phrase units representing, in effect, different nouns.  In this
       case, "dumbing down" to the unmodified noun occurs through
       resolving the "is-subproperty-of" relationship between the
       modified noun (qualifier-plus-element, or simply the qualifier
       standing as a shorthand for qualifier-plus-element) and the
       unmodified noun (unqualified element).

Although the two views both support dumb-down, they are different.  

    -- The view of RDF modelers like Eric and Andy has been #2.
       In this view, adjectives alone can stand for the
       adjective-plus-noun: e.g., an alternative title is coded as
       "<dcq:alternative>Story of my life</dcq:alternative>".  The
       process of dumbing down requires a dictionary function (i.e.,
       registry infrastructure) to resolve between the thousands of
       potential modified nouns in the metadata universe -- whether
       they are represented by adjectives-plus-nouns or by adjectives
       alone -- and the fifteen special unmodified nouns of the Dublin
       Core.

    -- However, as Sigge points out, #1 offers interesting and
       powerful possibilities as well.  For one thing, it would
       allow qualifiers like "alternative" (see Sigge's example
       below) to be used for more than one element without reinventing
       an identical but separate adjective ("alternative") for the two
       separate elements Title and Identifier.  It seems more flexible
       linguistically, and does not require us in some cases to
       reinvent -- redundantly -- identical qualifiers in parallel
       for different elements.

I tend to prefer #1, but the weight of RDF practice and the registry
based on it seem to be pushing us down the path of #2.  Does it
matter?  We should in any case recognize the ambiguity and address it
before we commit ourselves too deeply to #2.  At a minimum, perhaps we
need to distinguish in this regard between element refinements and
encoding schemes.

Tom


On Sep 20, Sigge wrote:
>In the qualifier recommendation, the "Names"  themselves are unfortunately
>poor, given that their intended use are as RDF/XML tags
>
>   <dcq:alternative>....</dcq:alternative>
>
>doesn't help someone who doesn't know in advance that it refers to
>alternative title. All of us thought about this as
>
>   DC.title.alternative
>
>To me, this usage is inconsistent. In the latter case the you can see that
>alternative is a QUALIFIER. In the former it is on its own, still
>representing the qualified element itself :(

On Sep 21, Sigge wrote:
>Now, this boils down to a distinction, which we haven't made, the one
>between the qualified element, and the qualifier. We have to make that
>distinction and settle how we want HTML metadata and other syntaxes to
>look like.
...
>The ballot was about qualifiers, not about qualified elements :(
...
>...we haven't made up our minds whether we are describing
>qualifiers alone, or the correpsonding qualified elements. You suggest
>that we should do the latter, but we did the former, and I *might* prefer
>that to the latter (I haven't made up my mind, though). My main point is
>that we have be aware of what we've done, and adjust our further actions
>accordinly.
>
>I would just like to give a few crazy examples:
>
>DC.identifier=http://sigges.own.server.com/my_novel.html
>DC.identifier.alternative=http://big.mirror.site.org/sigge/sigges_novel.html
>
>might be useful to have ;)
>
>Perhaps even
>
>DC.creator=Mark Twain
>DC.creator.isVersionOf=Samuel Clemens
>
>I don't want to say that these examples above are very good, but I leave
>them as a proof of concept that our *traditional* way of thinking on
>qualification is very powerful... 

_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker                                            [log in to unmask]
GMD Library
Schloss Birlinghoven                                           +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany                              fax +49-2241-14-2619




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