Re: Possible small RDDL enhancement

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>

>It dawns on me that it might be useful for a RDDL to declare
>what namespace or mime-type it claims to be describing.  Would
>it make sense to create a new optional element type, <rddl:class>,
>with attributes ns= and/or media-type=, which could be used for
>this purpose?

I envisage a world made of software modules!  Why not use Dublin Core?
[1][2][3]   Here is a template.[4]  (IANA provides some kind of directory
convention by which one can form URIs from MIME types.)

<meta name="DC.Identifier" content="--Namespace URL here--" />
<meta name="DC.Title"     content="--Title here--" />
<meta name="DC.Creator" content="--Creator here--" />
<meta name="DC.Subject" content="--Subject here--" />
<meta name="DC.Date"  content="2001-mm-dd" />
<meta name="DC.Type" content="dataset" />
<meta name="DC.Type" content="text" />
<meta name="DC.Description"  content=
    "A Resource Description Directory, using the RDDL format of rddl.org" />
<meta name="DC.Format" content="text/html" />
<meta name="DC.Language" content="en" />
<link rel= "schema.DC"  href= "http://purl.org/DC/elements/1.1/" />

Or, better, because then we don't need some system that undertands the use
of "link", embed an RDF section:

<rdf:RDF  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
                 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
   <!-- change these -->
   <rdf:Description about="--URL Here--">
         <dc:title>--Title here--</dc:title>
         <dc:creator>--Creator here-- </dc:creator>
         <dc:subject>--Subject here--</dc:subject>
         <dc:date>2001-mm-dd</dc:date>
         <dc:language>en</dc:language>

         <!-- don't change these -->
         <dc:type>dataset</dc:type>
         <dc:type>text</dc:type>
         <dc:description>A Resource Description Directory,
                using the RDDL format of rddl.org</dc:description>
         <dc:format>application/xhtml+xml</dc:format>
   </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

But rddl:class  would be terser.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

[1] [RFC2413] Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery. Internet RFC
2413.
<http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2413.txt>
[2] DC 1.1  http://dublincore.org/documents/dces
[3] types http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/
[4] IETF RFC (2731) titled "Encoding Dublin Core Metadata in HTML"