Trying to throw some support Andy's way...


IMHO the circularity of arguments here comes (once again) from trying to
figure out what to do with this animal (DC) without a clear mandate of
what it is useful for (simple metadata vs. detailed descriptions of
reality).

Starting at the extreme simple end of the scale, the old creator,
contributor, publisher (CCP) thing made sense when there was no idea of
'qualifiers'.  Some of us remember those good old days when people would
just fill in values for 13 (15) elements and the need for a data model
was irrelevant.  Given that context, the basis for the very informal
design for these three elements sounded fine.

Moving along the spectrum to simple qualification - qualification of CCP
continues to be a screw up from the modeling point of view.  Its pretty
hard to tell the difference between them and how qualifiers for one
don't wrap into the semantics of another.  I think this is where Andy is
lurking and he is just plain right when he argues that in a simple
qualfication model creator and publisher are refinements of contributor
and we should give some people way out of this bottlenectk.

Now if we move all the way to the other end of the spectrum, where you
want to express that the role of someone was 'illustrator using only red
on Fridays but then was an illustrator editor on Tuesdays' IMHO (yet
again) its time to say we are out of DC territory and reserve such
knoweldge expressions for the ontology folks who's first principles are
a bit(!) more rational than our 15 elements.  One of our favorite ex-DC
colleagues always used to call it 'polishing a turd' in response to
endless DC attempts to take these 15 elements and engineer them into
something for which they just weren't suited.

Moral:  once again let's figure out the motivation here and make the
appropriate compromises that are prejudiced towards that motivation
(rather than trying to be all things to all people).

Carl

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roland Schwaenzl 
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
> Sent: Friday, September 27, 2002 6:34 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: multiply affiliated refinements
> 
> 
> > From [log in to unmask] Fri Sep 27 09:26 MET 2002
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> > Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 2002 08:26:40 +0100
> > From: Rachel Heery <[log in to unmask]>
> > Subject: Re: multiply affiliated refinements
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> >
> > On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Andy Powell wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > 3) Carefully fit any newly proposed refinements for 
> dc:creator and 
> > > dc:contributor directly under one or other (but not both) 
> of those 
> > > elements.  E.g. I would consider dcterms:editor as an element 
> > > refinement of dc:contributor, not dc:creator.
> >
> > I think this would be rather too restrictive.... some 
> implementations 
> > may just want to use dc:creator and not bother with 
> dc:contributor. In 
> > which case this solution denies them the opportunity to use DCMI 
> > approved qualifiers. I would hope that the syntax constraints would 
> > allow for the flexibility to use the various 'agent' 
> qualifiers with 
> > each of the 'agent' elements.
> 
> The core point is, that
> dc:contributor
> dc:creator
> dc:publisher
> 
> are agentRoles as xy:illustrator xy:editor xy:censor and 
> whatever. Typically these semantics are not subOrdinated to 
> dc:CCP as CCP is based on responsibility.
> 
> Such elements can be used in parallel with DC and i don't see 
> any reason, why DCMI should re-do the work others have done.
> 
> If one starts to force subProperty relations DCMI would have 
> to create gadgets like creatorEditor contributorEditor 
> publisherEditor ..... ...and sooner or later we will have 
> creatorEditorManaging and will discuss about the deputy 
> mananging editor on whether she/he can happen to act as a 
> creator (the first executive managing editor might just have 
> been out for a DC Meeting)
> 
> So: This approach doesn't scale.
> Take things in parallel - saves lots of namespace engineering 
> issues and other unnecessary discussions and hasty conclusions.
> 
> rs
> 
> >
> > Rachel
> >
> >
> > 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > -----
> > Rachel Heery
> > UKOLN
> > University of Bath                              tel: +44 
> (0)1225 826724
> > Bath, BA2 7AY, UK                               fax: +44 
> (0)1225 826838
> > http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
> >
> >
>