At 01:18 PM 1/28/99 -0500, Ed McNeeley wrote:
>
>It seems to me that the bigger issues that have been thrown out to
>this list since DC6 ..... 1:1, relation, and the 'camp1' - 'camp2'
>dichotomy ...... are most problematic when viewed from the
>physical record or container perspective, and less of an issue
>(maybe none at all) when considered from the very old-fashioned,
>relational database perspective.
I'd like to hear more about this "database perspective." I suspect that
these are more than just different points of view, however. When the
"thing" that you are describing is a physical item or container, you have
to deal with that in your metadata. This is quite different from a database
record in which the data itself is the final object of study. For example,
a database of addresses is simply that: addresses. They are not intended to
stand for the physical environments they address, so an address doesn't
have to have a description of the building or anything else. It's an
artificial system, if you will, and the address itself is usually the goal
of searching.
With metadata, the metadata record iself is not the end goal; the end goal
is the "thing" (and I use that term loosely) that it represents. If we
start seeing metadata itself as a goal (and I think some are tending in
that direction) then it loses its value for discovery of anything but
itself. In that case, I would argue that we have "data" not metadata.
kc
----------------------------------------------
Karen Coyle [log in to unmask]
University of California Digital Library
http://www.dla.ucop.edu/~kec
----------------------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|