"LeVan,Ralph" wrote:

> Bath Profile title and DC.Title are clearly different.  There will be many
> others.
>
> But more importantly, as we discovered with Bib-1, we don't want to be in
> the position of blessing the indexes of other communities.  When Les
> Wibberly comes to us with a Boiling Point index, are we going to lump it
> into the same default index?  No, that was the easy, but wrong, answer that
> we started the ZIG with and I'd prefer not to repeat it.

I think it's important to separate the administrative/registry aspects of this
issue from the semantic discussion. Ignore  the so-called "cross-domain"
considerations and focus on the administrative problems.

Thus, don't look at dc.title as "title according to dc semantics" and bath.title
as "title according to bath semantics".  Look at dc.title and bath.title as two
different indexes (attributes, whatever) and the fact that they may share part
of their name (and some semantics) is coincidence.

I'm convinced that a single, central index set won't work. Ralph's boiling point
example illustrates that.  It's not because boiling point means different things
in different disciplines, it's because boiling point should be registered by one
of the disciplines that uses it, and the registerer should not be forced to
apply for registration in a central registry. Same for "east bounding
coordinate"or "cloud cover".  It's an administrative nightmare having different
disciplines submitting indexes to be registered in a central set. We've already
found that out.

I don't mean to trivialize the problem.  An attribute like "country" perhaps
should be in a more global set than the Geo set.  This means that we need to
apply some attribute-architectural principles to this development. I think what
got us into trouble with Z39.50 attribute architecture was the cross domain
stuff, and if we leave that out of this discussion it will be an easier task.

--Ray