In my work at Sun we've been looking for better ways to rationalize content purpose metadata for management of aggregated XML records. I had occasion to look at the DCMI Type Vocabulary. DCMI Recommendation. This is an ancient document, and was not sure what to make of it. One thing for sure is that we can't use it, or anything like it. We'll have to come up with our own values. I do wonder about the rationale behind that list. It seems quite the hotch-potch:
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Collection
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Dataset
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Event
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Image
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/InteractiveResource
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/MovingImage
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Service
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Software
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Sound
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Image
- http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text
Now the definition of dc:type is: "The nature or genre of the content of the resource". I can see how one could fit parts of the above list into this definition, but when I read this definition before seeing the list, I assumed I'd see things such as "poem", "short story", "essay", "news report", etc. From the business point of view, I'd be looking for "brochure", "white paper", "ad copy", "memo", etc. I tend to think this would be more generally useful (if much harder to standardize). Maybe ease of standardization was the rationale for the above? But even if so, it seems an odd mix. I've run out of time for now to ponder the matter further (gotta get back to that client work), but do I wonder whether there are recommendations for dc:type that more closely meet my expectations.