[openbiblio-dev] [pd-discuss] Bibliographic Metadata Guide

Wed Aug 24 15:02:24 UTC 2011

Primavera De Filippi <primavera.defilippi at okfn.org> wrote:

> The term "Auto-descriptive Metadata" was indeed unclear, I changed it
> into "Self-descriptive Metadata" - whenever the metadata contains
> sufficient information for the component and its relationship to the
> conference series to be completely self-describing, versus "Non
> Self-descriptive Metadata" - whenever the meaning of the markup
> language is implemented in the logic of the parser, i.e. the metadata
> is not self-descriptive.  Do you think that's more accurate and clear
> ?

No!  What does "relationship to the conference series" mean for a book?
What does "completely self-describing" mean?  Why does this distinction
(whatever is intended) make a useful categorization?
Also, in the pad I see something different again:
>Main distinction is between: 
>1. self-descriptive metadata (based on a metadata data model) 
>2. the rest

The meaning of this distinction is not  clear to me. Take for example BibTeX.
This page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BibTeX provides an almost machine-readable
description of the BibTeX data schema. Isnt that a metadata data model? 

I see DC is under both 1. and 2. 
I am left with no idea what is intended by the distinction or why it might be useful.

--Jim