Voor metadata-liefhebbers

Hoewel de kans bestaat dat er niemand is die gek genoeg is van metadata om deze post te snappen, laat staan er om te kunnen lachen, wilde ik dit toch even voor het nageslacht vastgelegd hebben. Een post op de CETIS metadata maillijst over de nieuwe versie van de UK LOM Core, leidde vandaag namelijk tot deze ‘boze’ reactie van een van de oudgedienden:

“All the evidence that I’ve seen seems to indicate that the only bits of LOM that get used are those bits already covered by DC-Education. But with DC you get a highly extensible underlying model [1], a choice of syntaxes [2] and a globally unique approach to identifying terms in the metadata using URIs [3]. So the kind of nonesense above simply does not arise – well, not often! “

Dat riep bij iemand anders de volgende reactie op:

“Of course we have our own very special strains of nonsense over in DC-world, carefully cultivated over the years. “

aangevuld met het verslag van deze (fictieve) conversatie:

“Newcomer: “So the creator of a resource must by definition also be a contributor, right? So dc:creator is a subproperty of dc:contributor. It must be, given your definitions.” DC-Veteran: “‘Subproperty’, eh? That’s what we call refinement round here, right? Oooh, no, lad, you couldn’t possibly say that.”
Newcomer: “But ‘An entity primarily responsible for making the content’ is also ‘An entity responsible for making contributions to the content’, right? If they are ‘primarily’ doing it they must also be ‘contributing’, by definition.”
DC-Veteran: “That’s as may be, lad, but we couldn’t possibly say it was a refinement. Ooooh, no. We’d end up with 14 elements in Simple DC then.”
Newcomer: “No, I don’t think so, you could still define dc:creator as part of Simple DC if you wanted and -“
DC-Veteran (puzzled): “Oooh no, nothing in Simple DC refines anything else. They don’t ‘dumb down’.”
Newcomer: “Ah, yes. ‘Dumb-down’. Funny expression. That’s RDFS inferencing, right?”
DC-Veteran (frowning): “Aye, if you say so, son.”
Newcomer: “But a refinement is a subproperty, and RDFS says subproperty means -“
DC-Veteran (agitated): “Now, look, sonnie, yer come round here from yer big city with yer new-fangled talk of ‘subproperties’ and ‘inferencing’ and yer start telling me dc:creator is a refinement of dc:contributor. Folks don’t like that sort of talk round here, d’yer understand? They don’t like it!”
Newcomer: “But RDFS says – “
DC-Veteran (standing and shouting): “I’ve had enough of yer RDFS this and yer RDFS that. I’ve told yer, we DON’T LIKE that sort of talk! It UPSETS people!”

Newcomer exits hastily and runs off in search of coherent metadata schema…..”

Als je nu nog geen grijns op je gezicht hebt, ben je geen metadata-geek.