Re: mapping table 2.0

On the discussion of ontology and complexity, forgive me if this has 
already been brought up, but it seems as if there are at least two 
places where the ontology and complexity can be evident.

One is in the obvious place:  in the expression of metadata.  This 
gives rise to complex (often XML) structures to describe what is 
needed;  things like
<person role="author">
   <name role="given"  order="2">Blatherick</name>
   <name role="given"  order="1">Fred</name>
   <name role="patronymic">Bloggs</name>
   <date role="birth" type="ISO-8601">1937-04-01</date>
</person>

and so on.  Every reader is burdened with the ontology tagging.


However, another approach is to define the tagging itself more 
precisely.  For example, one might say
"TDRL" is the DATE of the PUBLICATION of the WORK
TEXT is the NAME of the PERSON that WROTE the WORDS of the WORK
TAUB is the DATE of BIRTH of the PERSON that EDITED the TRANSLATION 
of the WORDS of the TRANSCRIPT of the AUDIO of the WORK



and so on.  I realize that this only helps with putting the tags onto 
a firmer foundation;  it does not help with (de-)composing tags (e.g. 
the XML above, where personal-name is decomposed), and nor does it 
help much with formalizing the type of the values (e.g. the type of 
the date string above), unless the tag has a required associated type.

But such tags might make it possible to do metadata conversion and 
i18n.  But getting such an ontology developed may be a research 
effort...
-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2009 00:03:20 UTC