re: relevance of SCHEME in metadata for education in Australia

Jack Gilding wrote:
Inclusion of the Scheme (and Language) qualifiers in the next version of
HTML would give a far more satisfactory format for storage of metadata in
HTML. Support from W3C for the implementation of the recommendations of the
DC4 Workshop will be important in encouraging the development of tools
which will allow  users to enter metadata in a way which is both convenient
for them and conforms to the semantics developed by the Dublin Core community.


I completely aggree. Both language and scheme are important for 
international, national or regional and even multilingual cataloguing.
For language, I would use ISO-2 characters as default, but other shemes are 
possible within the Language entity.

Example of use of scheme and language:

<meta name= "DC.subject" scheme= "GEMET 1.0" language= "fr" 
content="environnement, transport, politique">
<meta name= "DC.language" language= "en" content="French">
<meta name= "DC.language" content="fr">
<meta name= "DC.language" content="fr FR">

In this example, used for environmental purposes or distributed 'intranets', 
GEMET is the General European Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus. The use 
of the language property avoid to repeat the indexing in other languages 
equivalents and allow the indexing by the owner in his own language (and the 
language of his readers).
The 3 tags for DC.language are alternates, the 2 last beeing the standard 
default (the use of English would be ambiguous for several languages, in 
this case, French from France).

Bruno Kestemont

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Received on Thursday, 29 May 1997 06:07:52 UTC