Dr. Dobb's Journal July 1998
I was loosening tongues with alcohol, working the late bartending shift at Foo Bar, the Silicon Valley hangout where the elite meet to be indiscreet. I had just poured British journalist Laurence Wilde his first glass of Chardonnay of the evening and refilled Maureen McBean's Haig & Haig. Joe Weaver hadn't come in yet.
Joe was under no obligation to hang out with Larry and Mo, I reminded myself, but I was so used to seeing the three journalists together that I had come to think of them as the Three Stooges. When one of them was tardy, there was a certain ineffable je ne sais quoi missing from the eye gouging and the head thumping.
"This might interest you, Mo," Larry said with lamentable civility. (Lamentable from my point of view, that is. I only moonlight at Foo Bar for the entertainment value.)
Just then, Joe walked in. My spirits rose, but fell immediately. Clamped between his teeth was an enormous cigar. Foo Bar is a no-smoking establishment. I'd have to put on my enforcer hat.
"What's with the stogie, Joe?" Mo asked, swiveling on her bar stool.
He sat and held the thing out admiringly between two fingers. "All the cool people are into cigars."
I plunked his customary cream soda down in front of him. "Joe -- "
But he was on a roll. "Cigar parlors are the hot thing now. Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwartzeneg..."
Larry pushed the peanut dish in Joe's direction. "Positively fascinating, Joe. By the way, you might find this interesting -- "
"...are big cigar smokers. I don't mean they smoke big cigars, although they might...."
I tried to cut in. "You know, Joe, we have a policy -- "
"I've been asked to participate in the Dublin Core evaluation," Larry went on doggedly, intent on getting his point across. Joe turned toward me, smiling blandly, but Larry had caught Mo's attention.
As I wrangled with Joe over the cigar issue, I half-listened to Larry and Mo. From what I could hear, they were no more than half-listening to each other.
"The Dublin Corps, huh?" Mo said. "You know my family is Irish."
"There's quite an alphabet soup of schemes for facilitating search in electronic documents -- XML, XSL, RDF. It's positively dizzying keeping them straight. The Dublin Core is just one of them."
"A Brit would say that. It's not just one of them. It's the most important one. It's our island."
Larry pressed on. I was explaining to Joe that there is no cigar exemption to the California smoking ban, whatever he may have heard. "But the Dublin Core initiative," Larry said, "has already produced international consensus on a base set of 15 elements for descriptive metadata."
Mo pushed her glass at me and mimed refilling it. "Okay, George Mitchell has done wonderful work with the peace negotiations, but, Larry, you can't expect people to forget centuries of oppression. You Brits have got to get that through your heads."
"And it appears that the big guns at W3C are receptive to the DC proposals."
"Guns in the WC? You Limeys are such hoodlums."
"The 15 elements are already more or less supported in HTML 4. That is, meta tags in HTML 4 are underspecified. You clarify them by including a reference to a profile, a URL of a document that defines useful properties for meta tags. Dublin Core is one such profile."
Mo stared at him with the expression of a woman who has just awakened and found a reference librarian in her bed. "What the heck are you talking about?"
"The Dublin Core. The 15 metadata elements. Title, subject, description, source, language, relation, coverage, creator, publisher, contributor, rights, date, type, format, and identifier." She continued to stare at him for a moment and then turned to Joe. "Joe, you can't smoke that in here," she said, and took the cigar and crushed it on a coaster.
"But I wasn't going to smoke it," Joe wailed. "I just have it because cigars are the in thing."
The heck with these clowns. I'm going to run off and join the Dublin Corps. You can, too, at http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core/.
--Michael Swaine