[OAI-implementers] Reconsidering mandatory DC in OAI-PMH

[Sandro Zic]

Zitat von Matthew Cockerill <matt@biomedcentral.com>: 
> But it still seems to be that having a baseline metadata standard that *all* 
> OAI providers must implement is an *extremely* useful aspect of the 
> protocol.  
 
It is, but only where useful :) Think of OAI-PMH in the Weblogging world, to 
do some sophisticated RSS harvesting. DC is not used there, instead they 
disucss about RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RDF-based RSS, Echo, etc. to achieve metadata 
interoperability. 
 
OAI-PMH is very powerful as a generic protocol for metadata harvesting, it 
should not IMHO concentrate on metadata interoperability, instead on 
interoperability on the protocol level. Finding standards for metadata 
exchange on the metadata level should not be a concern of OAI-PMH as metadata 
is bound to the semantic domain where OAI-PMH is being used. 
 
Sandro 
  
> e.g. It is currently possible to build tools which will browse an arbitrary 
> repository, and list the titles of the new items which were added to the 
> repository that day. If you remove the support for Dublin Core metadata, 
> then even such a simple task would become impossible (right ?). 
>  
> Does it really follow that removing the requirement for Dublin Core support 
> would increase the support for other, richer formats? Surely the two things 
> are independent, 
>  
> Matt 
>  
> == 
> Matthew Cockerill Ph.D. 
> Technical Director 
> BioMed Central Limited (http://www.biomedcentral.com) 
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>  
>  
> > -----Original Message----- 
> > From: Martin Sevigny [mailto:sevigny@ajlsm.com] 
> > Sent: 05 August 2003 12:25 
> > To: oai-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu 
> > Subject: RE : [OAI-implementers] Reconsidering mandatory DC in OAI-PMH 
> >  
> >  
> > > Carl Lagoze wrote 
> >  
> > > 2.  The linkage between Dublin Core and OAI-PMH has been  
> > > over-emphasized 
> > > at the expense of the utility of OAI-PMH for dissemination  
> > of richer, 
> > > and perhaps more useful, structured data.  In some cases data  
> > > providers 
> > > with richer metadata (e.g., MARC, IEEE LOM) have been forced by the 
> > > requirement to dumb-down rich metadata to Dublin Core and have then 
> > > failed to provide the original metadata.  As a result, the community 
> > > looses the benefits of rich data and is left with the reduced  
> > > semantics 
> > > of Dublin Core. 
> >  
> > I do strongly agree with this statement. Many times, I had to  
> > go back at 
> > the basics and try to convince people tha OAI-PMH could  
> > transport other 
> > XML data structures then DC. 
> >  
> > This strong association has been of great importance in the early and 
> > rapid adoption of OAI, because it (may) remove the burden of  
> > agreeing on 
> > data structure for exchange. But I think that since this first step in 
> > the adoption of OAI is now done, it would not cause too much harm to 
> > remove this constraint. 
> >  
> > > generalization.  Although removing the Dublin Core  
> > > requirement would not 
> > > negatively impact existing or future data providers, it may impact 
> > > service providers whose applications depend on the existence of a 
> > > uniform metadata format. 
> >  
> > This is the main drawback of it. I personnaly believe that in a real 
> > distributed, multilingual, multivocabulary environment (very realistic 
> > today), the benefits of having a common model as limited as  
> > Dublin Core 
> > are not that important. 
> >  
> > > 1. Change the Dublin Core requirement to a recommendation. 
> >  
> > Agreed. 
> >  
> > > 2. Leave oai_dc as a reserved metadataPrefix 
> >  
> > Yes, it should. 
> >  
> > > 3. Move the oai_dc part of protocol document to Implementation 
> > > Guidelines 
> >  
> > OK. 
> >  
> > Martin Sévigny 
> > AJLSM 
> > sevigny@ajlsm.com 
> >  
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