Dublin Core in Multiple Languages: Esperanto, Interlingua, or Pidgin? 1.2 Dublin Core in Other Languages

The experience of artiicial languages like Es-peranto suggests they need good governance to control divergence in usage, but exibility to evolve and grow. Language engineers have neglected to consider pidgins | simpliied hybrids invented spontaneously by speakers of diierent languages. If Dublin Core is pidgin metadata, perhaps it needs an interlingua | a language-neutral set of elements mediating between richer sets | for the collective negotiation of meanings and for managing the inevitable tension between simplicity and complexity. Adaptations of Dublin Core in languages other than English would not be mere translations of a canon, but equal participants in an ongoing revision of that canon. 1 Simple versus complex The Dublin Core is \an ongoing eeort to form an international consensus on the semantics of a simple description record." 17] It deenes f-teen core elements | Creator, Title, Publisher, Subject, and so on | for describing \document-like objects." Designed to be simple enough for people unschooled in the science of cataloging to tag their documents for indexing by Web harvesters such as Alta Vista, it is being adapted for a wide range of applications. Some users see Dublin Core as a simple replacement for richer description formats, such as USMARC for library catalogs. Some want to use it as a simple interface to these richer systems. But others would like to take Dublin Core as a framework within which to construct formats as rich and elaborate as any others available today (\Dublin Core on Steroids"). 1.1 The problem with sub-structure Dublin Core's community of early adopters falls roughly into two pragmatic camps, Min-imalists and Structuralists. Minimalists value the generic simplicity of the fteen basic categories and propose to use them \as is" for coarse-grained indexing and retrieval by Web harvesters. Structuralists want to customize Dublin Core for particular uses and increase the precision of retrieval by specifying narrower semantics for the elements. For example, they want to qualify an element's name to specify that a given Creator is a Composer as opposed to an Author. In practice, however, Structuralists have proposed qualiiers that in eeect extend the semantics of elements rather than just narrowing them. For example, they want to extend the Creator element to include an author's AAliation. Such an extension could be very useful for customizing the Dublin Core for a particular local use. However, there are logical problems with this: an AAli-ation is not a kind of …