[OAI-implementers] Qualified Dublin Core

[Pete Johnston]

Just responding to a couple of specific points:

Tim said:

> There seem to be three major arguments (at least) that have been advanced
> for why OAI should host a canonical container XSD for qualified DC similar
> to the oai_dc.xsd currently hosted by OAI for simple DC:
> 
> reason 1. It would facilitate OAI metadata providers who want to provide
> metadata records in qualified DC and it is uncertain when or even whether
> DCMI will ever choose to assign a top-level DCQ namespace and make an XSD
> usable for that purpose. For the reasons Pete discussed, DCMI doesn't seem
> inclined to want to do this.

Simeon said:

> I wasn't actually promoting the idea that the OAI should provide a
> canonical DCQ wrapper schema, merely that such a canonical schema would be
> useful. The DCMI would seem the logical authority to put out such a schema
> though from Pete's comments it seems that is unlikely or at least not
> going to happen soon. Given this situation then it may be that the OAI is
> a reasonable second-best.

(Speaking only for myself and not for DCMI!), at this point, I don't think we
should conclude that DCMI will not provide a wrapper schema. There has been a
request for such a schema from another major user of the DCMI XML Schemas, and I
see occasional queries from individual implementers too. More or less at the
same time, the issue of versioning the schemas has raised by another implementer.

Makx has asked me to summarise what the issues are, and I haven't had time to do
it. So in terms of moving forward on that decision within DCMI I'm the
bottleneck at the moment :-( 

Having said that, as Tim and I have touched on, there is the underlying issue of
"what _is_ 'qualified DC'?" (i.e. just the use of the DCMI-defined terms or the
use of the DCMI-defined terms plus other terms), which has been another topic of
considerable debate. (FWIW, without taking a position on whether
pure-DCMI-qualified-DC is used/useful in practice or not, I think it would be
horribly confusing if OAI provided a schema to represent what was labelled
"qualified DC" and that didn't correspond to what DCMI labelled "qualified DC".)

Anyway, I'll do my best to get some notes to Makx and/or dc-architecture by the
start of next week. I can't predict what the outcome of those discussions will
be but hopefully it will be a step towards the DCMI position becoming clearer.
 
Pete