Tried to follow last nights IRC discussion about machine readable citations and metadata encodings. Please excuse some ill-informed ramblings...
Metadata encodings :- Seems like a good thing to me. Could be used as the basis for validation of metadata and possibly as a means of reducing some of the bespoke qualification of DC metadata terms that exists in Dspace. Machine readable citations :- This goes back to an old chestnut viz. a DC description should only describe one resource. In practice this is problematic in that typically we want to store information about a journal along with the information about a journal article. The correct DC way to do this would be to have two separate DC descriptions, one for the journal and one for the article, and have each refer to the other by use of hastPart and isPartOf. My suspicion is that machine readable citations are a fudge to try and address this. It allows the various bits that make up a citation to be stored as one term in the DC description, but in such a way that they can be picked apart. However, I'm not convinced this is fully thought out, the last time I looked there were only examples provided for journal articles and conference papers, nothing for chapters in books. Many sites, ourselves included, store the information relating to the parent journal in a second schema, we form the citation from the disparate bits on demand. I guess I just fear that by moving to a position of supporting machine readable citations we are encouraging what I consider to be a bit of a hack on the part of the DC community. <end of ramble> Cheers, Robin. Robin Taylor Main Library University of Edinburgh Tel. 0131 6513808 -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Planet: dedicated and managed hosting, cloud storage, colocation Stay online with enterprise data centers and the best network in the business Choose flexible plans and management services without long-term contracts Personal 24x7 support from experience hosting pros just a phone call away. http://p.sf.net/sfu/theplanet-com _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
