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Discussion Class 4

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

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Discussion Classes

Format:

Question

Ask a member of the class to answer

Provide opportunity for others to comment

When answering:

Give your name. Make sure that the TA hears it.

Stand up

Speak clearly so that all the class can hear

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Question 1: Terminology

The subtitle of the paper is "Cross-Domain Discovery or Resource Description?"

(a) What does the author mean by "cross-domain"?

(b) What does the author mean by "resource description"?

(c) What have pidgin languages to do with this topic?

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Question 2 (Old Midterm Examination)

What is the Dublin Core principle of dumbing-down? Are there any fields in this record that do not satisfy the principle?

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Question 2 (Old Midterm Examination)

What is the Dublin Core principle of dumbing-down? Are there any fields in this record that do not satisfy the principle?

"The theory behind this principle is that consumers of metadata should be able to strip off qualifiers and return to the base form of a property. ... this principle makes it possible for client applications to ignore qualifiers in the context of more coarse-grained, cross-domain searches."

Lagoze 2001

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Question 2 (Old Midterm Examination)

Dumbing-down failures:

Description.note Title from home page as viewed on Nov. 1, 2000.

Description Title from home page as viewed on Nov. 1, 2000.

which is not a description of the object

Publisher.place Nashville, Tenn. :

Publisher Nashville, Tenn. :

which is not the publisher of the object

Correct dumbing-down:

Subject.class.LCC E840.8.G65

Subject E840.8.G65

which is a subject code

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Question 3 (Old Midterm Examination)

4(b) The metadata in the fields Publisher and Publisher place end in punctuation marks. Can you suggest any reasons for doing so?

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Question 3 (Old Midterm Examination)

4(b) The metadata in the fields Publisher and Publisher place end in punctuation marks. Can you suggest any reasons for doing so?

This is a historic curiosity. It comes from the concept that the metadata will be printed, so that the metadata is stored in a printable format.

Publisher Gore/Lieberman,Publisher.place Nashville, Tenn. :

is intended to be combined with a date as follows:

Nashville, Tenn. : Gore/Lieberman, 2001

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Question 4 (Old Midterm Examination)

4(c) This record has no Creator field. It has a Contributor.nameCorporate field with value "Gore/Lieberman, Inc." Do you consider that this is correct use of Dublin Core? What would you put in the Creator and Contributor fields? Why?

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Question 4 (Old Midterm Examination)

Specification of Dublin Core:

A. All fields are optional. It is not necessary to have a Creator.

B. Definitions of fields

Creator The person or organization primarily responsible for the intellectual content of the resource.

Contributor A person or organization not specified in a creator element who has made significant intellectual contributions to the resource but whose contribution is secondary to any person or organization specified in a creator element.

Gore/Lieberman, Inc. is the corporate author of this web site and is therefore the Creator.

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Question 5: Mona Lisa with Curlers

The author uses Mona Lisa with Curlers to illustrate that metadata is not monolithic. He discusses a modular approach to metadata using metadata packages.

Explain?

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Traditional library cataloguing has worked well for more than one hundred years.

(a) What has changed?

(b) Why should we not continue to use traditional cataloguing rules?

Question 6: Change

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(a) What is a document-like object? Give some examples.

(b) Since hardly anything on the Internet is a document-like object, why is the concept useful in information discovery?

Question 7: Document-like objects

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The paper states that Dublin Core is "far from perfect from an engineering perspective."

(a) What does the paper suggest should be done?

(b) Why?

Question 8: Engineering

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This paper is an argument for simplicity in Dublin Core.

(a) What benefits come with simplicity?

(b) What is lost by simplicity?

(c) What approach can be used to overcome what is lost?

Question 9: Simplicity