DCMI Collection Description Community

DC Collection Description

Report of Working Group, July 2004

Highlights of workplan 2003-2004

The principal item of the workplan is the finalisation of the Application Profile for collection-level description, together with supporting materials.

Deliverable status, schedules and teams

The work on the DC CD AP has attracted significant interest from implementers of the RSLP CD Schema (from the UK and elsewhere) [1] and also from the NISO Metasearch Initiative [2].

In part as a result of this interest, further revisions to the DC CD AP have been made, in particular to increase the specificity of some of the proposed properties, and to select or develop encoding schemes for those properties.

The WG submitted two proposals for new properties to the meeting of the Usage Board held in March 2004. One of those proposals was accepted; the other was rejected.

The WG is revising the proposal which was rejected, and is also preparing several additional proposals for consideration by the Usage Board meeting in October 2004.

Work is in progress on the development of usage guidelines, and guidelines on expressing descriptions conforming to the DC CD AP using RDF.

A meeting of the WG will take place during the DC-2004 conference in Shanghai in October. The main item on the agenda will be to review the DC CD AP.

Any problems encountered/remedies proposed

Extensive discussion with members of the Usage Board and on dc-general on the subject of the isAvailableAt property highlighted:

  • the need to clarify aspects of the Collection-Service relationship
  • the potential impact of deployment of the proposed isAvailableAt (or similar) property on applications that rely on the availability of a dereferenceable identifier as the value of dc:identifier after dumb-down to 15 element Simple DC

The WG will seek to address these issues in its revised proposals.

It may be necessary to defer the development of guidelines on expressing descriptions conforming to the DC CD AP using XML until after October 2004.

References

[1] Collection Description Schema Forum, London, 12 February 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/cdfocus-schema-forum/

[2] NISO Metasearch Initiative Task Group 2: Collection Description. http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/niso-mi/