[uf-discuss] Citation: next steps?

[Timothy Gambell]

On Aug 30, 2006, at 12:42 PM, Michael McCracken wrote:
> I'm not convinced that a formalized Dublin Core microformat class set
> is necessary for a good citation microformat, and I do think it'd be a
> distraction to getting the main goal completed.

A modular system with hDC broken out does seem a little complex. I'm  
happy to borrow from hCite, and I'd hope that hCite would be designed  
to have pieces reused.

I say that because I'm interested in using hCite to describe works of  
art. From my point of view, class names based on DC's very general  
terms seem like a good choice, class names based on a medium specific  
citation format like BibTeX seem less good.

For example, BibTeX's "author" field implies the medium of the cited  
work (if it has an author, it must be text).  This makes it difficult  
to reuse terminology: what if I'm talking about something that had a  
painter, not an author? Using a more general term, like DC's  
"creator" get's the same work done, and is more easily reused: it can  
be applied to text, paintings, websites, and so on.

It would be great, then, if hCite were to be a superset of DC, using  
more medium specific terms from something like BibTeX only when no  
adequate alternative existed in DC. This way we sidestep the  
distraction of creating a DC format, but get the benefit of generic  
terms in the larger microformats class name pool.

Thanks,
Tim