Hi Tom,
> With regard to DCAM, it would be particularly interesting to verify whether I
> have accurately characterized the view of the DCAM authors -
As one of the authors - and speaking only for myself here -, yes, I agree with your characterisation of my view of the DCAM as that of an abstract syntax, with a direct relationship to the RDF abstract syntax. I tend to see it as an omission/bug in the current document(s) that this is unclear - and I think "fixing that bug" was the motivation behind what we sometimes called the "DCAM 2.0" draft. See
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=DC-ARCHITECTURE;c7ae0d2d.0909
http://dublincore.org/architecturewiki/DCAM-2.0
> and of those
> who have an alternative vision of what DCAM is, or could be.
>
> Would anyone like to argue for the "meta-model" approach?
From Mikael's description [16], I think I have a sense of what this might be, but - again speaking only for myself - it isn't what I had in mind when we were developing the DCAM (or the DSP and Singapore Framework documents).
Pete
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> Tom
>
> On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 04:57:11PM -0400, Thomas Baker wrote:
> > In 2010, DCMI undertook a critical review of the DCAM approach [14].
> > Discussion of the review at a joint meeting of the DCMI Architecture
> > Forum and the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group at DC-2010 [15]
> > revealed a striking lack of consensus about the meaning -- and value
> > -- of the DCAM approach. Some discussants agreed with its authors in
> > seeing the DCAM as an abstract syntax for metadata records based on,
> > and thus mappable to, RDF. Others, however, saw the potential value of
> > DCAM as a "meta-model" describing the components of metadata
> > descriptions at a high level of abstraction, independently of any basis in RDF
> [16].
> >
> > As written, the DCAM is clearly framed as the former -- i.e., as the
> > basis for automating the creation of validatable metadata records
> > whose contents can straightforwardly be exposed as RDF triples.
> > Attaining such degrees of interoperability and automation implies a
> > well-defined modeling basis, and the authors of DCAM saw RDF as the only
> candidate model with any traction.
> >
> > Proponents of the "DCAM as meta-model" view, in contrast, felt that
> > the model had value independently of RDF -- i.e., that the notion of
> > "statements" grouped into "descriptions" and enclosed within a
> > "description set" are valid in the absence of RDF's grammar of properties,
> classes, datatypes, and statements.
> > Whatever the merits of this latter view, it was clear that to define
> > DCAM as a meta-model independently of RDF, the base specification
> > would need to be extensively re-written.
> ...
> > [14]
> http://wiki.dublincore.org/index.php/Review_of_DCMI_Abstract_Mode
> > [15] http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/F2F_Pittsburgh
> > [16] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2010Oct/0098.html
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