DC went beyond just a 15-element-set for quite a long time
I totally agree with Andy Powell’s above assertion (as the title). Andy expressed it during DCAB meeting and afterwards in his blog post. Andy says:
In short, it seems to me that DC isn’t about 15 metadata elements – or even the slowly evolving list of 40 or 50 metadata terms that we have now approved. Rather, DCMI is the framework provided by the Abstract Model – a framework that supports a wide variety of metadata descriptions, using properties selected from anywhere that is convenient, and encompassing description sets that comprise descriptions of whatever set of entities is important to the task at hand. Rather oddly, we are now in a position where a DC description is a DC description even if it doesn’t use a single DC metadata term!
I was quite concerning about if DCMI airing this message, it may turn out to be a wrong message itself to most of people who adoring DC as a simple but powerful vision (maybe not tools by now) to make their living simple as usual in the “digital mess age”. They will be more confused than ever. We just finished a project in China (”Research on Standards and Specifications for Digital Libraries” project led by Prof. Zhang Xiaolin) in which we proposed quite a number of “recommendations” for application in various subject or application domain. We work very hard on making most of the specifications look like Application Profile but I know they are not. They are based on DCMES and DCQ (but go beyond a little bit), not following the DCAM (we just don’t know that yet) and they are all flat. They are being used in tens of applications now in university and academic libraries and institutions across the China. Just because even DCMI has not given us a clear and formal specification for AP. We know there has an EU standard but it’s far beyond enough. So what I recommend is, we should wait for some time to make a set of how-to-do information ready and clear, before we tell people what we shall not do or think
I left a comment after Andy’s post, and copied as following (on a little bit editing):
From the practical point of view, I am afraid that DC will never clear up the impression within people’s mind that it based up by (starting from) 15 elements. It’s almost a slogan to win people in defeating MARC etc. old-fationed metadata schema in some e-resources battlefields. And it becomes an icon, even a totem now. Remember old days we put aside the encoding and modeling things just because DCMI not ready to take care of them. Of course I think DCMI is in the right direction now. Sometimes more is not always better. Fifteen-element-set is still valid and will be valid for quite a long time because there exist quite a lot of national and international standards out there. I think we may still encourage plain people to include flat DC elements descriptions in their web pages and applations. Can we just layer our work and deliverables (recommendations) by different tiers such as elements (DCES/DCQ), schemas (DCAP), and models (DCAM maybe not) to let people decide in what level they prefer to implement, and tell people what is the best practice to achieve best interoperabilities. As far as I know, we may conclude two different model layers by now: the FRBR/OAIS… (ontology) layer and the DCAM (really abstract) layer.
