- From: Thomas Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>
- Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:55:24 -0500
- To: public-xg-lld@w3.org
A few general comments re: our categories [1]: -- I'd like for us to say more explicitly, up-front, that we are referring to things by these three handles -- Dataset, Metadata Element Set, and Value Vocabulary -- based on their typical usage. And that as these things can be used in ways other than their "typical" usage, the categories are not, as Mark already puts it, "airtight". As Mikael put it, the three handles are "not mainly used to categorize vocabularies but rather to analyze how vocabularies are used and combined in metadata application profiles". -- I'm wondering if Dataset is simply a superset of Metadata Element Set and Value Vocabulary -- i.e., anything we typically think of as an MES or VV, when used in a metadata context for anything other than as a source of "elements" or "values" for a "record" (or "application profile"), would fall under the definition of Dataset. Can anyone think of counter-examples? -- I'm slightly bothered by the emphasis -- particularly (but not only) in the definition of Dataset -- on the notion of a "structured metadata record". By this criterion, I'm guessing that many of the nodes in the Linked Open Data cloud would not qualify as Datasets simply because the data, while possibly derived from records, does not, when expressed as triples, consist explicitly of "records". -- I'm thinking that the Library Terminology page might therefore include an entry on records, citing some of the key definitions of "record" used in library science. That entry could be the place where the notion that a record is "basically a collection of statements about ... one entity" is called into question (by pointing out that in practice, records typically include some description about several entities). It could also provide a place to discuss the notion that descriptive metadata, in a Linked Data context, is primarily about description at the statement level, which is indeed what lends it so well to linking and recombination. That entry could acknowledge the role of records in traditional library science of providing a context for the provenance of metadata and perhaps flag this as a crucial issue for Linked Data (and RDF generally). Tom [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Library_terminology_informally_explained#Vocabularies.2C_Element_sets.2C_Datasets [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lld/2010Dec/0023.html -- Thomas Baker <tbaker@tbaker.de>
Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2011 03:56:01 UTC