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spothedog1 | 1 year ago

Can you explain why you think Dublin Core is a bad standard?

discuss

order

PaulHoule|1 year ago

(1) You can line it up side by side with the 1970 MARC standard

https://www.loc.gov/marc/

and, in terms of capabilities, MARC comes out way ahead. MARC is a standard for a university library, Dublin Core seems to be a standard that almost works for an elementary school library.

(2) Specifically, people who write a paper or a book will get prickly about the order that authors are listed in, but Dublin Core doesn't provide a good answer, particularly if you want to use authority records. I mean

   :Paper
       dcterms:creator "Alpher, Ralph" ;
       dcterms:creator "Bethe, Hans" ;
       dcterms:creator "Gamow, George " .
doesn't cut it because when you get the results back they could come back in any order. RDF has two different ways to represent ordered collections and they could have let you (required you to) write

    :Paper
       dcterms:creator ("Alpher, Ralph" "Bethe, Hans" "Gamow, George") .
which looks just like a Lisp list and internally is structured like one, but they didn't. In the XMP specification Larry Masinter specified that you do this

https://github.com/adobe/XMP-Toolkit-SDK/blob/main/docs/XMPS...

and boy there was a lot of good ideas in the XMP spec but Adobe wound up NERFing the implementation because Adobe was accused of throwing it's weight around too much. Sure you could write

   :Paper dcterms:creator "Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, George Gamow" .
but that won't work if you want to use URIs that point to authority records like the DC spec advises you to do. People hear RDF and think "Nothing to see here, move on" because of standards like Dublin Core that simultaneously seem inadequate and over complicated at the same time.