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Interpretation of HTML rev link metadata

This document is a collection of working notes on the meaning of Dublin Core metadata encoded in HTML link elements with rel attributes. This form of markup implies a reversal of the normal triple structure to take the take the target of the link's href attribute to be the subject of the statement, and the source document to be its object.

In a document whose URI is "http://source.example/document.html", this link:

<link rev="DC.Source" href="http://remote.example/resource.html" />

Gives the triple:

<http://remote.example/resource.html> <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/source> <http://source.example/document.html> .

This says that the document containing the link is the source of the document it refers to. If this is the case, then a document can make statements about other resources that are not governed by the owners of the respective resources, e.g.

<link rev="DC.Rights" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5000" />

This says the source document carries statements about rights to the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, which may not be true. The publisher of the source document may make arbitrary statements regarding another resource. The publisher of the other (Leonardo) resource cannot control the metadata statements made by the first (except legally).

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This document was last modified by Philip Shaw on 2005-03-11 08:04:05
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The Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html