Comment for dct:mediator

[tombaker]

PLEASE VOTE ON COMMENT BELOW

See note_mediator.md

Add comment for http://purl.org/dc/terms/mediator:

In an educational context, a mediator might be a parent, teacher, teaching
assistant, or care-giver.

In an archiving context, a mediator might be the archive that has specified
document accession rights to a resource.  

Note:

• In ISO 15836-2, these would appear as "NOTE 1 to entry:" and "NOTE 2 to entry:".
• The first comment is already provided in DCMI Metadata Terms.

[kaiec]

What if educational resources are archived?

[sarahartmann]

Suggestion without mentioning the context:
"A mediator might be a parent, teacher, teaching, assistant, care-giver or an archive that has specified
document accession rights to a resource."

[tombaker]

PLEASE VOTE THUMBS-UP/DOWN

See note_mediator.md

Add comment for http://purl.org/dc/terms/mediator:

A mediator might be a parent, teacher, teaching assistant, care-giver, or
an archive that has specified document accession rights to a resource.

[kcoyle]

There doesn't seem to be a way to vote "abstain" but I abstain from this one because I have no clue.

[kaiec]

@kcoyle IIRC there was a suggestion to use the "confused" emoji, though it looks not exactly neutral. But the wording at least fits your case :-)

[kaiec]

The suggestion to me reads more like a list of allowed cases while the original text was more open because of the mentioned contexts. I also think that it is confusing now because it is not clear to me if the accession rights only belong to the archive or to all mediators.

Do we have actual usage examples for dct:mediator? Would I for example be a mediator if I publish a collection of educational resources where I am not the creator of the single resources? Or is it to be used with a description of a lecture where I am in the role of the lecturer (and not necessarily the creator)? Confused actually also describes my state of mind ;-)

[jneubert]

To me the proposed text reads confusing, too. So hunting for actual uses seems a good way to see more clearly what people made of the property.

[jneubert]

A query for dct:mediator in the 2500+ datasets of LOD4ALL seems not to bring up a single triple.

[stuartasutton]

The archive use really stretches the original intention of the dct:mediator property. When the DC Education community brought the proposal for this education-specific property to the Usage Board in 1999-2000, there was a companion proposal for a dct:beneficiary property. These proposals came to the Board when DCMI was just beginning it's now defunct experiment in extending the DCMI terms to encompass community-specific terms.

In an education context, the intention was to provide the means for indicating the audience where the resource was not intended to be put directly in the hands of a student (i.e., the resource beneficiary) or would not be very useful if it were. This was an important distinction because repositories of learning resources ran into end user problems--complaints, lots of complaints--because, for example, people building student learning resource portals couldn't distinguish between resources suitable to hand directly to a student and those that were largely useless without someone mediating that use--e.g., a teacher's lesson plan or instructional guide intended for use by teachers in shaping learning experiences. Obviously, the dct:beneficiary property was never approved by this body, and the description for dct:mediator was generalized by the Board for broader applicability--thus today's discussion. So, while the proposed comment revision grates against the original intention, it probably fits with the Board's more generalized intention.

[kcoyle]

@jneubert Thanks for checking. If anyone can figure out a way to get a statistical profile for ALL dct properties out of lod4all, that would be a big plus. In the earlier stats that I viewed (~4 years ago?) there were MANY dct properties that were unused in that dataset. Then again, there were properties that were heavily used but only from a single source. Unfortunately we can't get stats from non-LoD uses, which is probably the majority of uses.

[jneubert]

In the Openlink dataset collection, the query discovers 1 triple in the metadata of ISA Programme Location Core Vocabulary, which links (via a blank node foad:homepage https://www.w3.org/community/locadd/) to the W3C Locations and Addresses Community Group.

[aisaac]

Thanks @stuartasutton for the historical context! And thanks @jneubert indeed for checking. With this two bits of information I'm afraid I will be not very constructive. I'd say I don't care much, and if you really wanted a recommendation for me, I'd vote for just deprecating the property, if it was part of a system that has not been entirely kept. Unless @stuartasutton tells me it's been used somewhere else, e.g. in LRMI.

[juhahakala]

I have discussed the definition of Mediator with a colleague, and we agree that the current text should be truncated, from

entity that mediates access to the resource and for whom the resource is intended or useful

to

entity that mediates access to the resource

since the current text covers both mediator and beneficiary (entity for whom the resource is intended or useful). We realize that this changes the semantics, but mediator just cannot be the entity for whom the resource is intended.

As far as I am concerned, UB should reconsider the decision not to approve beneficiary, because mediator is a little bit of an orphan without it.

Regarding the note: although the results are not unanimous, I have replaced the two notes in the ISO draft with the one UB voted on, with one small change: I replaced "archive" with "organization" since IMO there are no good reasons to limit the usage of this property to the educational sector or archives. Even So definition and note are are now:

entity that mediates access to the resource

Note 1 to entry: A mediator might be e.g. a parent, teacher, teaching assistant, care-giver, or an organization that has specified document accession rights to a resource.

---

Deprecating Mediator or any other property from the terms namespace is not an option, since successive versions of DC must be compatible. There may be DC users out there who have used this property, and we do not want to render their metadata incompatible with the latest version of the standard.

Please let me know what you think.

[aisaac]

+1 for replacing 'archive' by 'organization', especially in our expunged proposal. (the original was trying to identify different contexts and 'archive' might have been more relevant there.)

As for the approval of removing beneficiary from the definition: I think I like the idea of removing it. But this should be a different issue, not this one, which was only about the note.

[tombaker]

CLOSING - DISCUSSION CONTINUES WITH NEW PROPOSAL AT #44