John,
While I can appreciate the difficulties that writing the User Guide
posed, I do feel that this thread has wandered beyond the scope of what
the DC effort was originally intended to, or indeed can, do.
I agree with the things you have cut out of the realm of DublinCore, but
I would go further.
> DC Resource Discovery Phases Main DC Audience
> --------------------------------------- ---------------------------
> Search Support:
> (1) metadata provision phase PROVIDERS
> (entering and updating, whether by (authors, secretaries,
> hand or with automated assistance) site administrators, etc.)
>
> (2) metadata collection phase INDEXERS
> (gathering metadata, binding to (local programs, internet
> a resource, analyzing, indexing) crawler robots, etc.)
>
> Request-Response Search Cycle:
> (3) search phase SEARCHERS
> (formulation of request based (school kids, scholars,
> on metadata access points) nurses, professional, etc.)
>
> (4) selection phase SEARCHERS
> (examination of returned records;
> discard/select based on metadata)
I don't believe that 3 or 4 are limited to this forum.
The Dublin Core set of elements was meant to identify and convey specific types
of metadata about resources -- enough, if I recall the documentation correctly,
to construct a citation reference. When we started talking about the
Warwick Framework, we were working on ways of identifying and conveying
other types of metadata.
The issues you are getting at, I believe, have more to do with ensuring
that people will provide _"good"_ metadata -- data that will be accurate
and useful in a number of contexts. This may be more of a problem with
trying to write a User Guide than with the DC itself.
I believe that there is no single "right" way to use Dublin Core. Apart
from the fact that this group does not represent _one_ philosophy of
data to map resource attributes onto DC elements, it is not possible to
build a system that encourages or enforces one philosophy in such a global
system, _unless_ the only people ever to assign values to the elements
are trained professionals who have been educated in the single philosophy.
That is just not the case with DC -- it can and will be used in ways
never imagined by anyone in this group.
So, maybe you need to refocus your User Guide efforts, and write a UG for
DublinCore for _X_.
As various people have pointed out, people are picking up on Dublin Core
and already trying to put it to use -- and it is a bit difficult to do
so if it is in imminent danger of changing drastically.
I will also point out that, in the course of drafting together a document
on template definitions in Whois++, Martin Hamilton, Jon Knight, Patrik
Faltstrom and I worked on including a template type that will be
used for carrying Dublin Core data -- including the _necessary_ scheme-typing.
And, as Jon Knight also pointed out, we at Bunyip are looking to DC as
a mechanism for marking and carrying metadata, and hope to get something
useful out there RealSoonNow.
This is not a theoretical exercise -- the experiment is out of the lab.
Leslie.
--
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"The light at the end of the tunnel Leslie Daigle
is often the blindingly obvious..." Vice President, Research
Bunyip Information Systems
-- ThinkingCat (514) 875-8611
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