Namespace evolution.

Hi.

I'm confused. Again.

The Dublin Core site contains a working draft entitled "Guidance on
expressing the Dublin Core within the Resource Description Framework" [1].
In it, the suggested namespace for the 15 DC properties is
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/.

I recently came across an RDF file that claimed the namespace was
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/. I thought it was a typo at first but just
to confirm that it was before making myself look stupid (too late), I tried
retrieving the URL. Not only did it work (how cool is that?) but it also
informed me of the existence of DC 1.1. Of course, it's been out for over a
year and [1] is only a WD (also over a year old) but I was shocked to
discover that the web's most prevalent metadata "schema" and one of the few
real reasons to actually use RDF isn't even trying to be RDF-friendly.

What I mean by that basically boils down to this: If properties are uniquely
identified by the concatenation of their namespace and element/attribute
name as specified in the RDF M&S, how are we supposed to know that
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/title ==
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title?

Does the DC plan on releasing version 1.2 or higher? Shouldn't a version
agnostic namespace be used for RDF purposes in case they do? (How about
http://purl.org/dc/elements/rdf/? After all, both versions contain the exact
same elements.) Why hasn't [1] been finalized? If I quit bitching about why
nothing gets done and did it myself, would anybody listen? Or would they
just redo it later?

Speaking of namespace equivalency, a recent discussion on RSS-DEV [2] brings
up the question of how we might be able to tell when two or more properties
are "equivalent". Could an rdfs:isEquivalentTo (or such) core property be
added to RDF Schema before it's recommendation? Or do we expect everybody to
agree on their URI vocabularies?

Jason.

[1]
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc/datamodel/WD-dc-rdf/

[2]
http://www.egroups.com/message/rss-dev/870

Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 03:34:28 UTC