[uf-discuss] Citation: next steps?

[Michael McCracken]

On 8/30/06, Timothy Gambell <timothy.gambell at aya.yale.edu> wrote:
> 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.

Tim,

I agree that 'author' is bad for describing things that were not
'authored'. I also see that our wiki page with citation examples in
the wild ( http://microformats.org/wiki/citation-examples ) is really
heavily biased towards citations of text works.

Do you have any examples you could add that show how works of art are
being marked up on the web?

Is the situation of semantic markup just as bad in the art world as it
seems to be in my area?

Thanks,
-mike

-- 
Michael McCracken
UCSD CSE PhD Candidate
research: http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~mmccrack/
misc: http://michael-mccracken.net/wp/