At 08:54 28-10-98 +0800, Simon Cox wrote:
>For reasons of credibility and stability, including the need
>to accomodate the significant collections that have now been
>established, we should not abandon any of the DC-15.
I would like to second this motion (or third it.. or twenty it, at this
point?). I suppose I am a sort of generic Information Retrieval engineering
type, and I regularly use the DC as a baseline metadata framework in
various types of information domains.
Don't take this the wrong way, but I care little about the many efforts of
this group to define sub-structures to elements or various clever
approaches to package DC records. These things are given by my software and
network protocol environment (Z39.50), and the absolute center of the DC
for me are the 15 elements. There are a huge group of people out there who
have a passing knowledge of the DC, and they, too, think of the 15 elements
when they think of the DC - nothing else. It appeals to a lot of people's
imagination that you can show up with such a concise list of elements and
find that it makes SOME level of intuitive sense in such a wide variety of
information domains. Whether it later turns out to be sufficiently
expressive to harness the complexity of the domain (it almost never does)
is really besides the point. It gets people thinking about metadata in a
meaningful way, and with a bit of luck, it may even lead to interoperable
implementations.
The fundamental elements have been tampered with often enough to rock with
the notion of a near-universal element set. I don't doubt that the proposed
change would lead to a better data modeling tool - in fact I wish it had
been done that way from the beginning. But making the change at this point
would seriously damage the effect of the DC as a *political* and *learning*
tool, and that, for me, would be disastrous.
--Sebastian
--
Sebastian Hammer <[log in to unmask]> Index Data ApS
Ph.: +45 3536 3672 <http://www.indexdata.dk> Fax: +45 3536 0449
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