So,
I have been thinking about accessibility and metadata and have changed
some of my ideas. I'd like some feedback from others with experience.
I originally thought that we should think about solving the
accessibility community's problem of pointing to alternative resources
by using a new dc:relation:isEquivalentTo qualifier - now I am more
interested in having a dc:relation:isAlternativeTo qualification.
Equivalent and alternative content are not exactly the same but
equivalent content is alternative, so that works.
Please comment on this.
I am also moving towards not having either declarations or
certifications about accessibility in the relation
element - that is a weak way of thinking about them, I feel.
Instead, as conformance is often important, why not go for a new dc
element dc:conformsTo and then it is easily identified, useful in many
contexts, and can have suitable meaningful qualifiers such as
dc:conformsTo:accessibility (resource's accessibility) and
dc:conformsTo:metadata (resource's metadata) and dc:conformsTo:encoding
(stuff about the resource with values like XHTML) etc...
Whether or not the govt agencies want to make statements about the
certification that leads to the conformance declarations, I think there
are times when people want to record and access both the declaration
and the certification information. So I would recommend having them
both as qualifiers.
So we'd want dc:conformsTo:accessibility and
dc:conformsTo:accessibility:certification with the obvious benefit that
any certification info could dumb-down to the main
dc:conformsTo:accessibility
The other advantage of this approach is that if, for instance, a
resource has a description encoded in XML, or RDF, or something, it
allows for the necessary information about this to be available so that
eg the metadata's interoperability can be easily determined. I think
this would be stated in the same way - that the resource has metadata
in a format that can be used would be indicated in the values for the
element dc:conformsTo:metadata with the value XML or something and
possibly in there would be the namespace or scheme.
I'd be grateful for feedback about this idea too...
Liddy
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