On Aug 23, 2006, at 10:54 AM, Bruce D'Arcus wrote:
> There's one problem that we at the bibliographic would definitely need
> to get around, though, which is that author lists and such are
> ordered, while the RDF model is not. This would take some thought
> about how best to handle, but one suggestion that I'm liking from Ian
> Davis is that one allow a position or order property (which is how
> you'd do it in a relational database).
Come to think of it, in terms of requirements, I guess we might think
of these questions:
1) Do we need to allow one metadata description to reference another?
2) Do we need to allow arbitrary extension (which includes 1)?
3) Do we need to allow merging of ODF metadata?
I put the questions this way because I think the unordered nature of
the RDF model is necessary to enable 3 (but probably not 1 and 2). If
you have two descriptions for the same thing, for example:
<rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x:1">
<dc:title xml:lang="en">A Title</dc:title>
</rdf:Description>
... and:
<rdf:Description rdf:about="urn:x:1">
<dc:title xml:lang="es">Un Titulo</dc:title>
</rdf:Description>
... and you need to merge the descriptions, it becomes arguably
impossible to do if order is significant.
My answer to the above three requirements questions is "yes".
While I could imagine a circumstance where we say "no" to #3, I
actually think that would likely introduce more problems than it would
solve (it would admittedly solve my problem with order above).
Still, something to consider.
Bruce
