On Sun, 29 Jun 1997, Andrew Daviel wrote:
> Given that Dublin Core elements may be repeated, and supposing I wish to
> say that a document refers to Hull in the UK and not Hull, Quebec,
> and assuming we defined language = English so don't have to worry
> about Angleterre, etc., might one put (picking an example here of
> somewhere that has what amount to aliases if one doesn't inquire too
> closely)
>
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Hull, Yorkshire,
> England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, UK">
unwittingly (perhaps!) you hit another issue here -- that of alternate and
colloquial names. Hull is actually Kingston upon Hull, and it is currently
in the notional East Riding of Yorkshire (although it sits in its own
Unitary Authority, outside the administrative reach of the East Riding
council, but that's another story!). The ADS approach to resolving THIS
problem is to recommend the Getty's Thesaurus of Geographic Names as a
Dublin Core SCHEME which may be used to control the terms so that Hull is
ALWAYS recorded correctly as Kingston upon Hull.
Oh yes, and the local authority within which Hull sits has changed four
times in the past 20 years, but that's another problem...! ;-)
You raise another interesting problem with hierarchies of names, in that
Hull - Yorkshire - England - Great Britain - United Kingdom is a clear and
easily definable hierarchical progression from place - county - nation -
island - country [although people DO tend to get rather confused by
England/ Great Britain/ United Kingdom!], whilst United Kingdom and UK are
only synonyms of each other. Again, adoption of a sensible and fairly
intelligent system like TGN, incorporated with look-ups to the TGN
database, would solve most of these problems; you would RECORD the value
of Kingston upon Hull, and the database would 'know' that it is in
England, which is on Great Britain, which is in the United Kingdom, and
that United Kingdom = UK. These values would not be entered by the
cataloguer, but searches upon them WOULD find this entry, which only has
Kingston upon Hull as a coverage value.
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Hull">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Yorkshire">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="England">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="United Kingdom">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Great Britain">
>
> or
>
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Hull">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="Yorkshire">
> <meta name="dc.coverage.placename" content="England, United Kingdom,
> Great Britain, UK">
We add the ADS are currently most interested in your first option, where
all of the values are given in a single string. We would only split them
if the values were drawn from more than one SCHEME or TYPE, as each use of
an element is only allowed ONE SCHEME and/or TYPE.
Our feeling is that, whilst DC.creator.personalName may be used twice in
order to describe two DISTINCT and DIFFERENT creators, a use of
DC.coverage.placeName such as the one you suggest is actually concerned
with describing the SAME place -- all of the place names you list are
actually, in this instance, 'about' Hull, rather than being 'about'
Yorkshire, England or wherever...
Does that make sense?
Paul
== paul miller ================== [log in to unmask] ==
collections manager, archaeology data service, king's manor
york, YO1 2EP, UK tel: +44 (0)1904 43 3954
== http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ahds/ ==== fax: +44 (0)1904 43 3939 ==
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