Re: Metadata proliferation

On Sat, 8 Mar 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> On Sat, 8 Mar 1997, Misha Wolf wrote:
> > A note for readers not familiar with the Dublin Core, taken from 
> > draft-kunze-dc-00.txt:
See also the DC homepage http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core

> While "Dublin" may have meaning to those people who were there, it is quite
> meaningless for the rest of humanity. If you want to keep the acronymn, how
> about "Descriptive Core"? At least that has some semantic meaning.

We have a long history of naming things after places .. the treaty of 
Versailles, the Montreal protocol, Spanish 'flu. What's so bad
about "Dublin"? It's shorter than "Descriptive", anyway :=) 

> Gee, just "date"? Creation date (or first publication date) should be
> specifiable separately from modification date. Oh and there's expiration date
> too, where applicable. I think those should be provided for; otherwise, authors
> will just keep following their own style and ignore DC conventions.

Modification date and expiration date have specific meanings for the HTTP
protocol and can be left there (we've got javascript functions to
make them visible ..). DC is supposed to be cross-media and is supposed
to tie in to library cataloging records, etc. "Date" is intended to be
publication date in the current media. As qualified (DC.Date) it is 
unambiguous and you can look it up in the DC spec. (draft, whatever).

> will just keep following their own style and ignore DC conventions.
Ah, yes, quite!
I see that many HTML publishing tools create META tags, such as "generator",
"author", etc.
I'm collecting a list at 
http://vancouver-webpages.com/VWbot/metatags.frame.html
and would be interested in any other tags or uses of tags that people 
have come across. mailto:andrew@vancouver-webpages.com


Andrew Daviel

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 1997 03:53:20 UTC