Subject: Why Atom is not using Dublin Core?

From: Daniel Aleksandersen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:18:54 +0200

Hi list,

Can anyone please explain to me why the Atom 1.0 specification defined it's 
own elements instead of using Dublin Core elements? For example, why use 
<rights> and not <dc:rights> taken from Dublin Core's XML name space?

Hope anyone understands what I am asking about and have an answer for me. ^^
-- 
Daniel Aleksandersen

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From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:55:39 -0700

Part of the problem with the DC elements is their very loose definition,
e.g. is the text content of the element plain text? escaped HTML? Can it
contain well-formed XHTML? The atom:rights element is specifically
defined as an Atom Text Construct which unambiguously identifies the
type of content (text, html or xhtml).  If you look at all of the Atom
elements that have corresponding elements in the DC set, you'll find
that the Atom versions are very specifically and unambiguously defined.

- James

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From: Asbjørn Ulsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 02:00:12 +0200

On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 23:55:39 +0200, James M Snell <[email-masked]>  
wrote:

> Part of the problem with the DC elements is their very loose definition
> [...]

Another consideration, IIRC, was that we didn't want Atom to be littered  
with several different namespace URI's "out of the box". We wanted it to  
be a clean and easy to understand format, and having several namespaces in  
the core format would work against this goal.

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg     -=|=-    http://virtuelvis.com/quark/
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:24:04 +0200

On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 11:18:54PM +0200,
 Daniel Aleksandersen <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 10 lines which said:

> Can anyone please explain to me why the Atom 1.0 specification
> defined it's own elements instead of using Dublin Core elements? For
> example, why use <rights> and not <dc:rights> taken from Dublin
> Core's XML name space?

Thins to read:

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:29:43 +0200

On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 05:24:04PM +0200,
 Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 11 lines which said:

> Things to read:

Sorry, it seems I forgot the URLs :-(

http://internetalchemy.org/2004/03/theNucleusOfAtom 
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg03170.html
http://www.imc.org/atom-syntax/mail-archive/msg04474.html
http://bitworking.org/news/Not_Invented_Here

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From: Story Henry <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2007 22:07:12 +0200

Even though Atom does not use Dublin Core there is a semantics for  
those relations called AtomOwl:

http://bblfish.net/work/atom-owl/2006-06-06/AtomOwl.html

It would be a simple matter of adding inheritance relations from  
Dublin Core to AtomOwl. If you would like to contribute such a  
mapping feel free to propose it on the mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/atom-owl/

This ontology has not mooved much in the past year. It would be nice  
if a group of people could go over it one last time, so that we can  
place it at a URL that would get as wide an acceptance as possible.

It used to be part of the atom charter to have a semantics for atom.

Henry

Home page: http://bblfish.net/
Sun Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/
Foaf name: http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me

On 10 Sep 2007, at 23:18, Daniel Aleksandersen wrote:

> defined it's

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From: Bill de hOra <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:53:02 +0100

> Hope anyone understands what I am asking about and have an answer for me. ^^

IIRC, I supported this for so that all elements would be "under 
management" of the WG. Dublin Core's community thus cannot break Atom. 
Otoh there is clear redundancy across the formats. This is a policy 
matter - there are pros and cons to reuse/invention.

Also DC was/is unclear in places. Rights is actually a good example in 
terms of mapping. The Atom WG wanted rights declarations to not be 
computable (inferable) by machines, whereas DC doesn't exclude that. 
We've no business saying dc:rights can't be machine readable. It's 
better sometimes to introduce a new vocab term in such cases.

cheers
Bill