I agree with Stu that rights management is better left out
of DC (and in any event not subsumed under Relation).
It is a complex issue, one that is growing many new wrinkles
as the Internet develops, and one for which other mechanisms
are being developed right now. An object described by
a DC metadata set might be available under many different
rights regimes; if you pack that information into DC you
lose any potential to reuse DC metadata sets.
Also, all sorts of objects will need rights management info,
not just the documentlike ones for which DC is intended. We
can expect general methods of handling this information to be
developed, and it may be that there is no need for a DC-specific
method.
The idea of pointing to something that describes the rights
(perhaps in all their complexity, under all regimes) is
attractive, but 1) we ought to have some idea of what that
thing is before we define a way of pointing at it, and
2) it might turn out that the pointer would be better
placed in some other relationship to the object than by
being enclosed within a DC metadata set. For example, an
URC might include DC information, other information of
various types, and pointers to rights information.
Or maybe there are rights-management initiatives for
digital objects I'm just ignorant of?
Regards,
Terry Allen Fujitsu Software Corp. [log in to unmask]
"In going on with these experiments, how many pretty systems do we build,
which we soon find outselves obliged to destroy?" - Benjamin Franklin
A Davenport Group Sponsor: http://www.ora.com/davenport/index.html
|