discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

["Shelley Powers" <shelleyp AT burningbird.net>]

>
> Shelley Powers wrote:
> >> my friends at the W3C would be upset if I didn't.
> > Upset by what? That you used the data structure rather than the
> > literal? Or
> > that you used creator and didn't try to use creatorName?
>
> My friends at the W3C would be upset if we encouraged people to say the
> creator was a string, since doing so is silly.
>

Aaron, I have know people at the W3C RDF WG, too. Fancy that? Now that we
have this out of the way, let's try to work together.

Have you ever worked with a business application? Let's say for a bank or
insurance company, warehouse, military defense system, assembly line
workflow application, etc? I have. And you know something, we use names in
text format (i.e. 'strings' to most of our apps) to identify things all the
time. The name changes based on the system (i.e. the context), but it's
recorded as test and is used to represent the object. We all know that the
name in the database or on paper is not 'the thing'. This system works
nicely, too.

I have no idea why the semantic web folks, or whatever portion of them is so
twisted up about this amazing quibble about 'name is not the thing', are
re-writing the rules of data and how it's been handled for years to add
complexity to what should be a simple RDF/XML property.

However, regardless of personal view of this, you're pushing a form of
dc:creator that now differs from the documentation that exists at Dublin
Core _in published form_ and that exists in many many many applications,
including every use of RSS actively supported (RSS 1.0 and 2.0), most
weblogging uses, and I bet several other applications. Just something to
note.

However, you have also said that I don't have to use the RDF/XML as is, so
this is not a problem with me trying to get creative commons licensing
information into my stuff. Based on this will drop the issue. Perhaps some
others will be interested in taking this up. Or not.

Shelley