RE: WEBDAV: IETF 44 Brief Summary

> 1) There are two views of property reuse.  One view (which I held prior to
> the meeting) was that properties can be individually reused, and hence it
> might be reasonable to pluck out the "author" property from the Dublin Core
> and use it without using the rest of the Dublin Core properties.  The other
> view is that even individual properties are bound into a schema definition,
> and cannot readily be unbundled from the rest of their schema.

You _can_ pluck out the "author" property from the Dublin Core and
use it without using the rest of the Dublin Core properties. However,
you can't _interpret_ the Dublin Core "author" property without
at least some of the context of Dublin Core; e.g., its framework for
establishing author, publisher, creator, editor, songwriter, performer,
contributor, quoted source, translator and the relationship of those
to the date of publication, authorship, first performance, translation,
language, etc.

Even when properties stand alone, their definitions don't.
Thus, schemas. A registry of properties alone is like a book
index without the text it indexes: enough to tell you terms
were used, but not enough to understand the meaning.

Larry
-- 
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 1999 05:30:35 UTC