Dates

[Ray Plante]

Hi Tony,

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Ray Plante wrote:
> >   Date should be CreateDate and LastUpdateDate
> To be consistant with similar cases (e.g. Contact), the RM document could 
> be updated to define two dates this way:
> 
>   Date.Creation
>   Date.Update
> 
> This is naturally rendered in XML as 
>   <Date>
>     <Creation>...</Creation>
>     <Update>...</Update>
>   </Date>

After playing with this a bit, I think I would prefer to separate these 
two dates out as direct children of Resource.  We probably would like to 
control the occurance constraints of each type of date depending on the 
context.  With the above structure the occurances defined for Creation and 
Update would be fixed anytime one reuses Date.  

Instead I would recommend the following:
  o  keep Date as originally defined in the RM and v0.8.2
  o  add CreationDate and UpdateDate as separate metadata.  

One question:  I'm thinking that these new dates are meant to refer to the 
metadata description itself (as opposed to the resource), yes?  Do you see 
these dates being of primary importance to registry management (e.g. for 
managing replication) or will they have value to registry clients as well?  

I like to tuck information that is primarily for administrative purposes 
into attributes.  If these are primarily for registry management, can we 
make these attributes of Resource?  (I'm easy either way).

(FYI: OAI handles update dates for replication in its XML record envelope.  
Of course, this need not have any bearing on whether we include it 
directly in VOResource in some way.)

cheers,
Ray