[OAI-implementers] A question for implementers of harvesters

[Thomas G. Habing]

Hi Caroline,

My inclination would be your #1 below for the reasons you've already 
given.  I don't think any OAI harvester would have a problem harvesting 
records with a 'mixed' XML schema where various namespaces are imported 
or included from different schema.  In fact the OAI_DC schema itself is 
already like this, defining its own root element and then importing the 
DC elements from a different XML schema.  MODS is similar, importing 
xlink attributes from a separate schema.

Kind regards,
	Tom

Caroline Arms wrote:
> This question is a structural question about XML Schema in the OAI
> context.   We have a project to develop an XML Schema for the
> structured Format Description Documents (FDDs) in
> http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/.  One objective is to
> make the FDDs OAI-harvestable.
> 
> One aspect of the FDDs  (example:
> http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000022.shtml)  is
> that the text in many of the table cells needs to be richer than
> plain text. We have identified a small set of HTML tags that we want
> to be able to use in a complexType to be called notesText.   We want
> the schema to limit us to that small set of tags as we edit FDDs.
> 
> We have two structural options for the fdd.xsd schema.  We plan to
> have the fdd.xsd schema use the namespace "fdd" and require that
> element names be qualified with their namespace.
> 
> 1.  We could put the HTML tags into a separate .xsd file (to be
> included in fdd.xsd) that does not require the elements to be
> qualified.  This way we could use the HTML tags directly within the
> chunks of notesText.  They would be easily recognized, have familiar
> semantics, and be handled trivially in XSLT transformations to HTML.
> 
> 2.  For the convenience of having the specification in a single .xsd
> file, we could use different names (presumably in the fdd namespace).
> These would be more cumbersome to read in the raw XML and need more
> work to convert to HTML.
> 
> What do you see as pros and cons between these options?  For example,
> will OAI-harvesting applications have problems with the two-schema
> approach (option 1).
> 
> Thanks for any feedback.   I will also be asking potential users of
> the harvested FDDs the equivalent question.
> 
> Caroline Arms Library of Congress, Office of Strategic Initiatives 
> caar at loc.gov
> 
> 
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-- 
Thomas G. Habing
Research Programmer
Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign