An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model
This allowed me to gain an understanding of what the Dublin Core Data Model is and how it came about. It lost me though when it started to show examples of the behind the scenes stuff.
Ie: ...
<!-- declarations in resource http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ -->
<rdfs:Property rdf:ID = "contributor">
<rdfs:label> Contributor </rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment> An entity responsible for making contributions to the content of the resource. </comment>
</rdfs:Property>
...
I understand that this is just one way of trying to coordinate standards and that it is making some headway, or has already taken place. The author said that it was just his opinion of the relationship between RDF and DCMI, but I did not see his opinion anywhere. I may have just missed it, though.
Introduction to Metadata, pathways to Digital Information: 1: Setting the Stage
If metadata is like the Internet, then how do we contain it? This is the major question that, I think, will be asked throughout the semester if not the time we spend here at Pitt. This article does a good job of showing how it is trying to be contained, but agrees that it is ever growing and that some things can not all be contained or described the same way. Which is the problem. Our job as future librarians is to help solve this problem. I personally have no solution. I think that because it is so vast that there is no way to contain it all. Once we think it is all contained, something will come along and screw this system up. I do think that there has to be a way to at least make sense of all the information out there and create some kind of system to organize it all. What that system is, I have no idea.
Database
I did not know that there were various types of databases. After reading this article though, I now realize that there are many of them, but that they all try to do the same thing. Locking the various databases seems like a good and bad idea. If you lock it so no one sees it, then how do you gain advice on it? I do agree that some things need to be locked so other people don’t edit them unnecessarily. I agree with what was said by the author about indexing. If indexes can speed data access but slow data maintenance, it is worth it to index?
It just dawned on me that perhaps the "method behind the madness" of the readings this week was to show the progression of starting with a database, which I think of as the repository of information, to metadata, which organizes the information so that it's useful, to Dublin Core, which is one step further in the refinement of metadata, with the goal toward making it accessible to everyone, whether they know AACR2 or MARC or not. (Yeah, it took me a while to see the relevance of the readings, I know.) So I think maybe Dublin Core is the latest proposed solution to your question about how to contain metadata. I like the idea of folksonomies, but I just think that that will create vocabularies that are way out of control, and we won't be able to find anything.
ReplyDelete