Annotea schema question: meaning of dc:creator in annotea RDF

Annoteans,

I've been experimenting with writing a server that implements a 'read
only' Annotea server, ie. one which can emit annotations based on its
stash of RDF docs, but which doesn't implement the creation/upload
features of the Annotea protocol. The RDF is acquired by harvesting, or
other means, rather than directly via the Annotea protocol.

One consequence of this is that it moves us away from a situation
where we'd expect annotation-payload (HTML/SVG/etc body) to be co-costed
with the RDF describing the relationships between the annotating and the
annotated document. These needn't be co-located on the same server, or
indeed have been  created by the same person. In this context, I'm wondering
whether dc:creator means what we might want it to mean.

Here's an RDF document I wrote, based on an example from the annotea site.
I changed it, to make the 'annotation body' be a pre-existing document in
the Web. I authored the RDF, someone else authored the 'body'.

I've two questions:

 - does this usage style over-stretch the Annotea vocab? (It seems useful,
   but perhaps not quite what Annotea expects).
 - do we agree that the dc:creator named in an Annotea RDF doc such as
   that below is asserted as the author of the RDF statements linking the
   annotated doc to the annotating doc? (and not of the body...)
 - ...and that as a consequence we have no way of knowing from Annotea's
   current RDF who it is that created the annotating document?

If this is the case, maybe the 'creating an annotation with POST'
operation in http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/User/Protocol.html should also
have some explicit dc:creator statement(s) about the body, since those
might differ from the author of the enclosing RDF (eg. in the case of
file-upload or copy from elsewhere).

cheers,

Dan

RDF example:

	<r:RDF xmlns:r="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
	       xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/annotation-ns#"
	       xmlns:d="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
	 <r:Description rdf:about="http://fireball.danbri.org/people/danbri/2002/08/annotea/test2.rdf">
	  <r:type resource="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/annotation-ns#Annotation"/>
	  <r:type resource="http://www.w3.org/2000/10/annotationType"/>
	  <a:annotates r:resource="http://www.scientology.org/"/>
	  <a:context r:resource='http://www.scientology.org/'/>
	  <d:creator>Dan Brickley(?)</d:creator>
	  <a:created>2002-08-04T12:10Z</a:created>
	  <d:date>2002-08-04T12:10Z</d:date>
	  <a:body r:resource="http://www.xenu.net/" />
	 </r:Description>
	</r:RDF>

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 07:08:44 UTC