Semantic Dementia

Karen Coyle: “Semantic dementia” is a term for something many of us of advanced age experience: forgetting words we once knew. It brings to my mind, however, the kind of demented semantics that we often encounter in standards in our field, and the use of or creation of words that obscure the meaning of the standard. DCAM defines a set of metadata types that can help us communicate to each other about our metadata. It should simplify crosswalking of metadata sets, and make standards more understandable across communities. Unfortunately, it has not done so, at least in part, because of some rather demented semantics.