Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] URN as identifier

[Bob S. <bo...@sc...>]

> From: Kendall Clark <ke...@mo...>

Hi Kendall,
It was very helpful to hear from you. Are you still the
maintainer of the OMF DTD?
 
> I worked on OMF so let me see if I can remember some good answers to
> these better questions.
> 
> As for "more general URI": yes, exactly. I wasn't being careful to
> distinguish URN from URI and URL in the DTD, as I should have been. I
> suspect that attribute should be renamed "URI" -- at least, that's
> what I'd name it today if I were working on the DTD now.
> 
> [stuff deleted]
> 
> The ambiguity of OMF's RELATION pretty faithfully mirrors the
> ambiguity, at the time, of Dublin Core's use of RELATION. That is,
> it's vague on purpose, in a kind of librarian, infosci, you just never
> know sense. :>
> 
> What we need, and maybe Dublin Core has made some progress on this, is
> a way to specify the *type* of RELATION; that is, a controlled
> vocabulary that gives us a way to specify kinds of RELATION between
> resources.

Actually, Dublin Core has done just that with the element
qualifiers they published 2000-07-11.  They are described
in <http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmes-qualifiers/>.
For the <relation> element, they have:

  Is Version Of
  Has Version
  Is Replaced By
  Replaces
  Is Required By
  Requires
  Is Part Of
  Has Part
  Is Referenced By
  References
  Is Format Of
  Has Format

The one that caught my eye was "Is Version Of", since
that seems to capture the relation between a given
document and the seriesID.

The question is then: How is this encoded in an OMF
metadata? I notice that the OMF <relation> element already
has a "status" attribute by virtue of the core attribute
set in the DTD.  It would seem we could just assign a
specific value for the status attribute.  For example:

<relation  status="IsVersionOf"  url="seriesID-expressed-as-uri"/>

This means the document connected to this OMF <resource>
is a version of the seriesID.

> SK doesn't necessarily need to rely on a controlled
> vocabulary from another organization in this regard; if Dublin Core
> has released one by now, there's no reason to think that it will
> necessarily be useful in the SK effort. The SK team is perfectly able
> to define it's own controlled vocabulary for kinds of RELATION, given
> its problem domain; make it public, maintain it in a clear and open
> fashion, and, perhaps most importantly, make sure that who or whatever
> is generating SK content is amenable to using it.

Right.  To quote from the Dublin Core qualifiers document:

"It is expected that implementors will develop additional
qualifiers for use within local applications or specific
domains. Such qualifiers may not be understood by other
applications."

We could make it more SK or OMF specific by saying:

<relation  status="omf-series-id"  url="seriesID-expressed-as-uri"/>

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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                                            email: bo...@sc...