Talk:Extend Metadata

I have been working to understand the use of dcterms:rights in the context of its use in an RDF representation of Darwin Core (http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/ ). I am puzzled in your use on this page. When you use the RDF:

 <dc:rights>
   <Agent rdf:about="http://me.yoyo.dyne.name/">
     <dc:title>Yo-Yo Dyne</dc:title>
     <dc:date>1001-10-01</dc:date>
   </Agent>
 </dc:rights>

you are asserting that the object of the triple containing dc:rights as its predicate is rdf:type Agent. But this does not make sense to me. Although dc:rights does not have any declared range, dcterms:rights does have a declared range of dcterms:RightsStatement . So if you had said:

<dcterms:rights>
   <Agent rdf:about="http://me.yoyo.dyne.name/">
     <dc:title>Yo-Yo Dyne</dc:title>
     <dc:date>1001-10-01</dc:date>
   </Agent>
 </dcterms:rights>

you would be asserting that Yo-Yo Dyne was a dcterms:RightsStatement (i.e. a statement or legal document) in addition to a Person, which doesn't make sense to me. Granted, since dc:rights doesn't have any declared range, there is nothing implied about the object of the triple, but the text definition of dc:rights and dcterms:rights are identical. So I can only conclude that DCMI intends for them to mean the same thing. If you really want to talk about the person who holds the rights to a work, why aren't you using dcterms:RightsHolder which is "A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource." and has the range of dcterms:Agent ? It seems like this is exactly what you are talking about.

Steve Baskauf