Re: DCMI Metadata Terms "historical record" in RDF(a)?

The history shouldn't be lost, though I can't imagine any value in the
foreseeable future.

Just pack it in the attic and at most give the cardboard box an
rdfs:seeAlso, I would say.

Cheers,
Danny.

On 11 May 2012 21:40, Thomas Baker <tom@tombaker.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> A bit of an aside...
>
> I'd be interested to hear any views on whether it makes sense to try to express
> the "historical record" of DCMI Metadata Terms [1] -- term-by-term snapshots of
> information about properties and classes as Comments or Definitions were
> tweaked, domains or ranges were added, URLs to external documents were updated,
> etc -- in RDF(a).
>
> For example, the "Bibliographic Citation" was issued on 2003-02-15 as an
> "element refinement" [1].  On 2008-01-14, it was modified with a tightened
> usage comment, a formal domain of dcterms:BibliographicResource and range of
> rdfs:Literal, and explicitly declared to be of type "property". (The RDF schema
> had been saying that for years, but the user-facing documentation had until
> then used legacy terminology for "term types", such as "element refinement".)
>
> I made up this snapshot system for individual term descriptions about ten years
> ago on the model used to version DCMI documents, which was itself modeled on
> the W3C method of versioning documents.  I have often wondered whether this
> method is the right one (or at least "good enough"), and how one might express
> this information in RDF (and for what purposes).
>
> I do think it would be counterproductive to generate this document with RDFa
> for each separate historical version of a term.  Simply expressing all of this
> historical information in RDF statements the status of which would depend on
> the meaning of "replaces" does not seem useful.  Hence my recommendation that
> we simply exclude this document from the process of embedding RDFa and continue
> to serve it up as an ordinary, flat Web page, as now.
>
> I would, however, be interested to hear ideas on how the historical data might
> eventually be put into a more useful form.
>
> Tom
>
> [1] http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/
> [2] http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/#bibliographicCitation-001
> [3] http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/#bibliographicCitation-002
>
> --
> Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>
>



-- 
http://dannyayers.com

http://webbeep.it  - text to tones and back again

Received on Friday, 11 May 2012 19:58:01 UTC