Hello everybody. I apologize for the crossposting, but this is an area that could (potentially) affect every one of these groups. I realize that not everybody will be able to respond to all lists, but...
First of all, some back story (Code4Lib subscribers can probably skip ahead): Jangle [1] requires URIs to explicitly declare the format of the data it is transporting (binary marc, marcxml, vcard, DLF simpleAvailability, MODS, EAD, etc.). In the past, it has used it's own URI structure for this (http://jangle.org/vocab/formats#...) but this was always been with the intention of moving out of the jangle.org into a more "generic" space so it could be used by other initiatives. This same concept came up in UnAPI [2] (I think this thread: http://old.onebiglibrary.net/yale/cipolo/gcs-pcs-list/2006-March/thread.html#682 discusses it a bit - there is a reference there that it maybe had come up before) although was rejected ultimately in favor of an (optional) approach more in line with how OAI-PMH disambiguates metadata formats. That being said, this page used to try to set sort of convention around the UnAPI formats: http://unapi.stikipad.com/unapi/show/existing+formats But it's now just a squatter page. Jakob Voss pointed out that SRU has a schema registry and that it would make sense to coordinate with this rather than mint new URIs for things that have already been defined there: http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/resources/schemas.html This, of course, made a lot of sense. It also made me realize that OpenURL *also* has a registry of metadata formats: http://alcme.oclc.org/openurl/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=Core:Metadata+Formats The problem here is that OpenURL and SRW are using different info URIs to describe the same things: info:srw/schema/1/marcxml-v1.1 info:ofi/fmt:xml:xsd:MARC21 or info:srw/schema/1/onix-v2.0 info:ofi/fmt:xml:xsd:onix The latter technically isn't the same thing since the OpenURL one claims it's an identifier for ONIX 2.1, but if I wasn't sending this email now, eventually SRU would have registered info:srw/schema/1/onix-v2.1 There are several other examples, as well (MODS, ISO20775, etc.) and it's not a stretch to envision more in the future. So there are a couple of questions here. First, and most importantly, how do we reconcile these different identifiers for the same thing? Can we come up with some agreement on which ones we should really use? Secondly, and this gets to the reason why any of this was brought up in the first place, how can we coordinate these identifiers more effectively and efficiently to reuse among various specs and protocols, but not: 1) be tied to a particular community 2) require some laborious and lengthy submission and review process to just say "hey, here's my FOAF available via UnAPI" 3) be so lax that it throws all hope of authority out the window ? I would expect the various communities to still maintain their own registries of "approved" data formats (well, OpenURL and SRU, anyway -- it's not as appropriate to UnAPI or Jangle). Does something like this interest any of you? Is there value in such an initiative? Thanks, -Ross.