I'll start by mentioning that I've put on a hard hat and a flame-
retardant cape, just in case I need them.
It's also worth reiterating Stu's mention of my long involvement
with DC. See, for example, RFC 2413 (Dublin Core Metadata for
Resource Discovery), dating from 1998:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2413.txt
As I've mentioned in previous postings, the News Architecture
Working Party of the International Press Telecommunications Council
(IPTC) is actively examining the use of DC for those of our metadata
elements where there is a good semantic fit. Having been involved
with DC all those years ago, I had assumed that this would be a
relatively pain-free matter. I was wrong. Consider the humble
title. RFC 2413 defines this as:
The name given to the resource, usually by the Creator or
Publisher.
The current official DC documentation states:
Definition: A name given to the resource.
Comment : Typically, Title will be a name by which the resource
is formally known.
Ouch! This comment may well work for the Library community. It
certainly does not work for many other communities, such as Web page
authors, professional photographers, or news organisations.
If I change the title of one of the hundreds of Web pages I maintain,
I am most certainly not changing "a name by which the resource is
formally known".
The same applies to a professional photographer changing the title
of one of thousands of photos on her/his computer.
And the same applies to a news story ... the title (ie headline) is
most certainly not any kind of formal name.
So we have a problem. If the Semantic Web is to work, it is not
enough to employ some common syntax or even a common abstract model.
We need to be able to share meaning. And this is obviously a
balancing act between having definitions that are so broad that they
become meaningless and definitions that are so narrow that they fit
only one community and are not shareable. Those of us working on
the architecture of mainstream news standards, perceive the comment
associated with dc:title as being on the latter end of the spectrum.
And so, as Chair of the IPTC News Metadata Framework WG, I am asking
the DC community to reconsider the text of the comment accompanying
the definition of dc:title.
Many thanks,
Misha Wolf
Standards Manager, Reuters
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