Gosh, I generated a lot of energy with my humble opinion :).
Robin - I hear what you're saying, but, as Jim points out, no structure is
going to save us from sloppy catalogers. I'm guessing that someone who is
too lazy to code the role probably won't bother with the publisher at all.
That said - you have no way of knowing this, but to some extent you're
preaching to the converted when you talk of cringing over conflating
publisher. Just so you understand from whence I come, I'm driving
"on-the-fly" dynamic portal pages for our entire Intranet off of the
publisher element - so I definitely am a fan of preserving its integrity.
I originally objected with conflating publisher with contributor and
creator, but I've been challenging myself to figure out how to make the
agent proposal work rather than finding reasons why it won't. Perhaps you
and Jim are articulating the reasons why it really will not work after all.
Gisle - Of course, you're quite right, I think most of us understand that
the software can work all kinds of magic behind the scenes in terms of
combining or separating elements for a query. Notwithstanding Robin's
concerns that people will be too lazy to code clearly defined roles, I
think that some of us feel like a conflated agent could help with shades of
gray - when there really isn't a clear choice for the role someone played,
and where by making an arbitrary choice, we could actually prevent
searchers from finding resources. Where legitimate ambiguity dictates, a
vanilla DC.Agent element gives us a way to code someone as simply an agent
without any role - something you'll agree I can't do with strictly named
fields.
Jim - You have a great point here about keeping people from just coding any
role they want - that was _not_ where I was going. (After all ... I'm the
one who wants to see a creation tool that actually goes out and audits
element values to ensure that they conform to the designated schema.) I
was simply advocating solutions that facilitate making _controlled_
extensions.
Pete Winn
Knowledge Management InformationTechnologies
Information Services International - Los Angeles, CA
Email: [log in to unmask]
Voice: (973)691-3853 (MTO ext. 3853)
Fax: (310)446-1626
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