> Fedora's "internal" > datastream is not called oai_dc; it's called "DC", and uses an element > with the namespace prefix "oai_dc" as a container.
Fair enough; I was sloppy with my terminology and I shouldn't have been. That meeting said, it's clear that this is a blocker for any number of people who are getting set up either with Fedora itself for the first time, or with Fedora and OAI PMH. The namespace prefix oai_dc *means* something out in the world, and for that matter so does the identifier "DC" (even if not as formally). Asking it in Fedora to mean something else confuses new users, it is one more roadblock between concept and production for tool which is nontrivial to configure at the best of times. Quoting Thorny: "I wish we had called the DC datastream "repoMeta" or something. It was just intended to be the base metadata needed for the repository manager to be able to function and was not intended to be exposed externally." People setting up a Fedora instance, or implementing OAI PMH for an existing Fedora instance, see the apparently meaningful prefix oai_dc, on top of the apparently meaningful datastream name "DC", and get confused. Yes, I understand that oai_dc is reserved in such a way that it can't be used internal to Fedora, it's reserved for an OAI PMH implementation. Yet normal humans are going to see the namespace oai_dc and react accordingly. At a minimum, the documentation should be updated to highlight this potential confusion. > It is a default, so it > seems appropriate for proai to fallback to that in the absence of > other configuration. Except it doesn't, because (a) the message on the mailing lists for the last year has repeatedly been "don't put any metadata into DC datastream, except what Fedora requires", and more importantly (b) sharing a meaningless internal identifier via OAI PMH as dc:identifier is bad practice, and should never be a fallback default. > The "internal" character of the DC datastream isn't that dramatic- > your objects can certainly have identifiers, titles, and formats that > you define for them. Actually, that's not true. They can't have identifiers you define for them. The DC element's dc:identifier field is restricted to being the fedora pid. Unless there is something I am very much missing. Thorny has repeatedly said that we shouldn't be loading up the DC datastream with metadata because it's bad practice (mostly because of the performance problems he discusses in that e-mail you cite). Is that not true? -Deborah ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Software Download: Index, Search & Analyze Logs and other IT data in Real-Time with Splunk. Collect, index and harness all the fast moving IT data generated by your applications, servers and devices whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. Deliver compliance at lower cost and gain new business insights. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Fedora-commons-developers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fedora-commons-developers
