At 02:10 PM 8/20/2004, Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress wrote:
>[...] I hope we will continue thinking about how we might
>qualify indexes in cql.  Rob suggested an indicator of "metadataness";  I
>think we should develop something more general that would serve also as a
>combination functional/semantic qualifier, possibly allowing us to avoid
>defining multiple similar indexes, as for example gils distributorCountry
>and contactCountry.
>[...] if "county" is common to many applications, and "distributor" is more or
>less specific to GILS, doesn't it seem like we should be able to qualify
>"country" by "distributor", with "country" defined in a general context and
>"distributor" defined by the GILS context?  I don't know what to call such a
>modifier [...]

This sort of discussion is _exactly_ what ISO 11179 deals with. In ISO 11179,
every element is regarded as being composed of one or more re-usable
"concepts".
Concepts such as "Distributor", "Address", "Country" and "Code" can be each
defined separately. Then, anyone can readily make a composite element like
"CodeCountryAddressDistributor" which would be defined, obviously, as:
"The code of the country of the address of the distributor".

Rob is cogitating on this approach, I believe.

Eliot