As Mike says, "One man's data is another's metadata."

In Eliot's GILS set he makes a threefold distinction for bibliographic
data:

The 'work'        (eg The Chroniques of Jehan Froissart)
An instance       (eg Pierpont Morgan M.804)
A catalog record  (a surrogate in the Morgan catalog for the instance)

Which seems a very reasonable distinction to make, and could easily apply
to non bibliographic data as well.
Each of these might have a date associated with it.  A date for the
original, a date for the printing, and a date for the cataloguing.
They all have different creators as well:  Froissart, an unknown scribe,
and the cataloguer at the Morgan who described the manuscript.


Currently in CQL we have the dc context set and a (somewhat substandard)
rec context set for metadata about records.  However this doesn't provide
for anything other than searching the catalog record and for information
about that record.  We still have a modeling problem when it comes to
distinguishing the 'meta'ness of our data.


My proposal is to add a new relation modifier to the CQL context set
called, for example, 'level'
This would be used to determine the level of metaness to apply the search
at.

For example, to use a simple case of author vs cataloguer:
    dc.creator any/level=work "tolkien asimov"
    dc.creator any/level=metadata "sanderson taylor"

Or:
    dc.date any/level=work "1336"
    dc.date any/level=instance "1420"
    dc.date any/level=metadata "2004"

Then we can ditch a lot of the indexes from 'rec' which don't sync well
with the indexes from dc (for example)

eg:  rec.lang       vs   dc.language
      rec.id         vs   dc.identifier
      rec.createdBy  vs   dc.creator


Thoughts?

Rob


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