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

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 09:57:32PM +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
> 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.

Thank you, Danny.  That is essentially what we are doing now.  Each
property or class has a dcterms:hasVersion statement pointing to an 
HTML anchor in the "historical record" document (or "cardboard box",
as you put it):

    dcterms:Agent
        dcterms:description "Examples of Agent include person, organization, and software agent."@en-us ;
        dcterms:hasVersion <http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/#Agent-001> ;
        ...

Simple confirmation that this is good enough for now is helpful input.

Thanks,
Tom

> 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

-- 
Tom Baker <tom@tombaker.org>

Received on Friday, 11 May 2012 20:08:39 UTC