> From [log in to unmask] Fri Nov 29 15:16 PST 1996
> > [John Kunze wrote:] ...
> > While designing these tools is clearly out of scope for meta2, designing
> > the DC with these phases and tools in mind is entirely appropriate.
>
> Yes -- but it is a delicate balance to achieve the right proportioning
> of "understanding the needs of the space" and "attempting to completely
> define the space".
I wouldn't go near the latter. Just getting started understanding
the needs of the space (audiences/phases) is good enough for me.
> So my point was that "good" metadata is in the eye of the beholder, and
> is therefore beyond the scope of the work of this group.
>
> How I have understood your position is that you want to use DublinCore
> to ensure that people can tag their resources _Correctly_, and the
> global resource index will be built.
Good, bad, correct -- somewhat loaded terms. Let's just say "consistent",
which doesn't weaken your point. From the User Guide:
"One goal of this document is to encourage metadata consistency as a way
to promote complete retrieval and intelligible display across widely
disparate sources of descriptive records. With inconsistent metadata,
search results tend either to omit desired records or to drown them out
in a flood of irrelevant records. Effectively, inconsistent metadata
hides desired records." [ http://www.ckm.ucsf.edu/meta/mguide3.html ]
> _That_ is what I object to, because it seems to me that many of your proposals
> for how Dublin Core should be "fixed" stem from having one perspective on
> how it should be used. I understand that you are attempting to make that
> perspective as general as possible, but it is still one perspective.
I'm very glad you brought this up. If you think, for example, that a goal
of the DC is to provide only a holder for application-specific metadata,
with no particular shared semantics, then we have a foundation-level goal
conflict that needs to be resolved immediately.
This is a perfect illustration of why a clear goal statement is crucial.
-John
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