Thomas Baker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> If we were to see these arbitrary concept spaces as definitive of the
> Dublin Core element itself, we would have to re-define Creator (for
> example) as "any set of biological, legal, medical, biographic, or
> metaphysical attributes associated with the entity primarily
> responsible for making the content of the resource".
No -- actually we wouldn't. As I recall, the Dublin Core reads "the entity
primarily responsible for making the content of the resource" not "a string
of characters representing the name of the entity primarily ...". There is
nothing "definitive" of any human being, so our society has chosen to prefer
the use of the name to identify people, but this does not mean it is our
only option. It would likely be just as valid to identify it through some
other means. You don't often see journal articles "by a man with social
security number 0123330350450" but this does not mean that doing such is
"wrong".
This is yet another reason why we should allow the use of a first-class
resource to be the "attribute" of a Dublin Core element. This allows a
"smart" system to make a choice as to which attribute it would like to use
to represent the resource. However, I agree, we should provide guidelines
for the most common operation: retrieving an appropriate literal.
> 1) What needs to be "converted" to a simple text string? Not the
> "method" -- I assume to mean "the INTNODE". And I assume you are
> not suggesting we develop complex algorithms to take arbitrary sets
> of attributes as input and produce "appropriate literal" text
> strings as output. Rather, I take you to mean that one would need
> to require that the INTNODE of a DC element contain a default value
> that already holds an appropriate literal. If so, then yes.
Except I don't think that we will be able to do this because of the
resources already currently available that may not follow the guidelines we
propose. Instead, we should suggest something that finds the proper balance
between suggesting the proper behavior and being compatible with existing
behavior.
--
[ Aaron Swartz | [log in to unmask] | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
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