If you adopt someone else's terms, you are stuck with their definitions, and if they decide to change them, you have to revisit your decision: a constant maintenance headache.

The foaf vocab is in Testing status, version 0.98. Are they going to change it before it comes out? Who knows?  Will they add something better like foaf:sortName that is more like a traditional library listing?
 
Just coming up with a list of all the possible terms out there and fighting over whether they are close enough to use for each term we have will be a major use of time.

On DC, people you might not be for it, but if we opened the BF vocab up, there might be a lot of clamor for it; it's so simple and it's all over the place!

Nate
PS I had a good laugh about the Unicode and ISO 639 "roll our own comment". I'm working right now on developing a computer that uses 2s and 3s instead of 1s and 0s.

-----Original Message-----
From: stuart yeates [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2013 5:31 PM
To: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum
Cc: Trail, Nate
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] re-using existing properties (was http://bibframe.org/documentation/bibframe-authority/ and the "lightweight abstraction layer")

On 23/05/13 05:25, Trail, Nate wrote:
> I think when you start reusing existing properties, you're relying on 
> them being around for the long haul, and requiring systems that 
> consume them to be aware of all the multiple namespaces.

The "syntactic sugar" option used by madsrdf:hasCloseExternalAuthority does not introduce a new namespace from the users' point of view. The syntactic sugar can even be kept in a separate RDF file from the definition of the bibframe properties, making it second class and invisible to everyone who doesn't want it.

 > In all cases, I can't
 > see us (the library community) agreeing that the way foaf or dc (or  > whatever) uses a term really matches what we're talking about.

Following that arguement we should also walk away from ISO 639, ISO 3166, RFC 3986, Unicode and so forth. None of them are perfect from a library point of view but all of the are better than rolling our own.

[For the record I'm not suggestion using dc / Dublincore.]

cheers
stuart
--
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/