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2009-07-18 DanBri to public-media-annotation@w3.org

    On 18/6/09 11:16, Pierre-Antoine Champin wrote:
    > According to your interpretation, the director of a movie would be
    > covered by the definition, which was indeed not intended (or did I miss
    > something? ;-)

    Yes, I was going on what was written, rather than what I thought you 
    might've really meant!

    Other projects have danced around this problem. Early Dublin Core talked 
    about "document like objects" with a strong emphasis towards online 
    documents, but then you get the museums and archival community involved, 
    and suddenly a physical painting, or a slide from a photos of that 
    painting, or a roll of old movie film, all seem also in scope. And it 
    turns out (eg. as concluded by http://dublincore.org/workshops/dc3/) 
    that documents like objects, online and offline images, can usefully be 
    described with many common properties.

    It seems you want to limit things to content / works and content-bearing 
    objects, rather than admit the entire universe here?

    BTW re "Any Resource (as defined by [RFC 3986])", ... I wouldn't bother 
    citing http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3986.html for a definition of 
    resource. All it says is

          "This specification does not limit the scope of what might be a
           resource; rather, the term "resource" is used in a general sense
           for whatever might be identified by a URI."

    I suggest instead "thing", since that's all RFC3986 "resource" means 
    these days.

    > Would "Any Resource (...) representing a media content" be clearer (this
    > is a question to the WG as well) ? It may seem a little too "concrete"
    > at first sight (e.g. implying "machine representation"), but I think the
    > following paragraph makes it clear it can be more abstract.

    Taking my "thing" suggestion, that gives ... "Any thing representing 
    media content". This seems a reasonable statement of intent. Perhaps the 
    best way to make this concrete (amongst ourselves, if not in the spec) 
    is by example. Which of the following are intended to be Media Resources:

    1. a library MARC record describing a DVD
    2a. a HTML page describing that same DVD (some specific DVD)
    2b. an Amazon HTML page describing the general class of that DVD (ie. 
    that you can buy)
    3. An MPEG movie embedding metadata describing the film (from the DVD)
    4. A videotape of the film
    5. A set of several thousand identical 35mm films with that same content
    6. A rusty metal tin on a specific shelf of a national archive room, 
    containing one of those films
    7. The abstract notion of Shakespeare's Hamlet
    8. The abstract notion of the W3C homepage
    9. A printed, written transcript of the soundtrack to a film
    10. Information about the creator of (9.).

    This is just a rough list, from top of my head. Main points: do you 
    include physical artifacts directly? does there need to be a digital 
    representation involved somewhere?

    Thinking again about

    "Any thing/resource representing media content", isn't that almost 
    circular or somehow redundant, if "media" is taken to mean the carrier 
    or means by which content/information is represented or transmitted?

    Can you give some more borderline counter-examples (apart from the 
    Director) of situations where something is *not* a media object?