Troll-baiting with poorly thought-out metadata metaphors
Okay, work with me on this one.
MARC is kinda like modern western tonal music. It provides a fairly strict structure but allows many ways to play around with what that structure really means. You can catalog (play) all kinds of materials (popular styles) with it. It's modal in that the same sets of tags and indicators and subfields can be essentially downshifted into other gears that provide different meanings and feel surprisingly different from each other (aeolian, mixolydian, phrygian), and only really skilled catalogers know how to make that work, but, still, most people can grasp how to describe books with a little training.
RDF is twelve-tone. It's mathematically rich and can be used to construct all manner of complex superstructures but when you get right down to it, there aren't really a lot of people composing in it today, so to speak. Sure, there are a few notable exceptions (Piggy Bank, Stravinsky), but how many of you spin the ol' Schoenberg on your iPods?
The rough-and-tumble world of Rolling Your Own Metadata Strategy is all about free jazz. Maybe you'll be lucky and find a few kindred spirits and together once in a while you'll find harmonies or a groove or a sharp, memorable dissonance worth sustaining. But it's unlikely to take off among the broader populace even if you have double your rhythm section. If it's your thing, you might as well name your next schema Ornette, since more of us should know that name, but don't count on the world beating a path to your door no matter how brilliant an innovator you might be.
Dublin Core is rock-n-roll, a usually (but not always) severe restriction of major-minor tonal music not unlike the pentatonic scale. Fifteen elements and the truth!
The manner of complexity inherent in the loosely interpretable notion of "catalog records" which the googles of the world present us with in our journeys to the Great Stacks is sugary pop music. Catchy, instantly recognizable, ultimately effective worldwide, but still just a surrogate for what we're really after, no matter how carefully crafted.
A stretch, to be sure. Never been one to spin out hit singles, me, but I'll keep trying.
Bruce (not verified) on September 19th 2006
Apples and oranges; you're using metaphor to compare disimilar things.
MARC is a data format, RDF a model, and DC a set of property terms. Given that RDF has been used to express both DC and MARC, I don't think it really fits.
So I'd say if you want to argue that MARC and DC are like X and Y music, then you'd want to say that RDF is more like the tonal structure underneath.
dchud on September 19th 2006
"Poorly thought-out", I cried.
Apple computers are like Sonny Rollins. Exceedingly cool, typically in the pocket but sharp enough to dance around outside it occasionally without ever losing the groove, needed to hang out under the bridge for a few years refining tone, attack, and microkernel message-passing efficiencies, and a really, really awesome beard on that one album cover, and still going strong.
Orange computers were decent Apple computer clones.
Oranges are like Apples!
(Sorry, Bruce, I didn't mean for this post to be taken seriously.)
Bruce (not verified) on September 19th 2006
Right; not enough coffee this morning ;-)
dchud on September 19th 2006
Which is to say, you're right, in any case. :)
Ed Summers (not verified) on September 20th 2006
Ok, so as Bruce pointed out there are data formats here, and models, and properties...but....
JSON =~ PUNK ROCK
dchud on September 20th 2006
YAML?
Jonathan (not verified) on September 20th 2006
Hahaha!!! Man, that was AWESOME. Consider your feed subscribed!
Ben (not verified) on September 21st 2006
hmmm... what about free form metadata?
http://www.hyperorg.com/backissues/joho-oct15-04.html#data
Is that sort of like an random noises?
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