Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 00:29:38 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Roland Schwaenzl 
To: thomas.baker@gmd.de
Subject: Re: [DCMI-Usage Board] Mission and Principles

Dear Thom, 

the Grammar description appears rather restrictive to me. In fact it is
rather impractical for DublinCore for interoprability to require
sentences with objects just literals. It's quite common for languages
to have subjects of one sentence as objects in another.

A 'literal target requirement' actually would kill DC to play a
substantial role in a semantic web -

I know it's a difficulty, but we should not mix dumb down with the
basic grammar. That will not work.

For dumb down it suffices to have a rule on how to find an appropriate
literal. It is not necessary, that an appropriate literal is the only
thing which is there on the symbolic level.

A person or organisation perfectly qualifies to be called a 'resource'
- (There was a person Karl Marx and not just a name Karl Marx).

[The proper dc element representing the name of a person literally is
dc:title of the person. 'title' from the retrospect is a  not very
cleverly choosen label for the data element].

Best wishes for the meeting at Dublin
rs