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

[François Schiettecatte]

Hi

I agree with Matthew here. One of the great strengths of OAI is its
mandatory support for the Dublin Core metadata format. Losing mandatory
support for that would be a mistake and would likely balkanize OAI in
various competing subformats (much like what is going on with RSS/RDF).

My suggestion would be that publicly accessible OAI servers should be
required to support the Dublin Core metadata format. If you are using OAI
internally then, obviously, you should be able to decide what formats you
want to support.


On 8/5/03 8:10 AM, "Matthew Cockerill" <matt@biomedcentral.com> wrote:

> I'm surprised that all contributors to this discussion have favoured
> removing the obligation for implementers of the OAI-PMH protocol to support
> a baseline Dublin Core metadata format.
> 
> BioMed Central makes available not just Dublin Core, but also its own richer
> XML formats, including the fulltext XML of our research articles. So I can
> certainly see that there is an argument that the OAI community needs to
> encourage and foster the use of OAI in ways that go beyond the basic
> provision of DC metadata.
> 
> 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. 
> 
> 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)
> 34-42, Cleveland Street
> London W1T 4LB
> 
> Tel. +44 20 7631 9127
> Fax. +44 20 7580 1938
> Email. matt@biomedcentral.com
> 
> 

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François Schiettecatte                               FS Consulting, Inc.
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