A simpler format for OLAC vocabularies and schemes

[Martin Wynne]

Gary,

Sorry about my long response time, but I'm just catching up on mail from the
last month or so on this list in preparation for the workshop. The following
is with reference to Steve and Gary's posings from 31st October.

If I understand correctly, the proposal is to move from:

	<title>Orginal title</title>
	<title refine="alternative">Translated title</title>

to:

	<title>Original title</title>
	<dcterms:alternative>Translated title</dcterms:alternative>

I've checked with the relevant DCMI website and this does indeed seem to be
in conformance with their recommendations. Now perhaps in that case I should
take this up with the DCMI and not with OLAC... What I can't see is why the
<dcterms> element is neither embedded in the <title> element, nor identified
as a type of title element (as in OLAC 0.4). To put it bluntly, a human
can't see what it is an alternative type of, since it is not tagged in any
obvious way as a title. Does this require that "alternative" be defined
(somwhere?) as a type of title? And in this case, shouldn't it be called
"alternativeTitle" or something more transparent?

Up to this point I am heartily in accordance with the suggestions for
simplifying the formats. I agree that syntactic conformance with DC is a
good thing, but they now seem to be going down a road which aims to flatten
out any hierarchical organisation of the data classification, and makes
human readability of the XML impossible.

Further apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick here by coming in
belatedly to the discussion.

Best,
Martin