DC comments & questions

[Roy Williams]

Tony

I don't think anyone is advocating that we use DC in our syntax. It is the
semantic conversion that is important. We could use the French words for
Creator, Date, Description etc -- so long as the translation back to the DC
terms carries exactly the same semantic meaning.

> 2. Where, with things like identifier and coverage, we have structured
data
> while DC mandates simple string data, how and where does this conversion
> take place?

I am assuming there will be a translation layer to convert VOResource to DC.
In our registry at Caltech, it is implemented with an XSLT script. Of
course, the mechanism is up to the implementor. In fact, the implementor is
not even required to use VOResource. So long as they can produce correct
VOResource for the harvestor, it could have been translated from a
relational database with column names in Hungarian!

The IVO identifier already is a simple string, right? Like this:
            ivo://RoysAuthority/RoysDataCollection

As for coverage, we should leave it up to implementors for the moment, let
the community choose the standard (i.e. next year's interop).

> 4. If so and where our metadata does not map to a simple string, should we
> put the DC term in here and mandate that it is not captured from the
> user/dataaset but is constructed from the structured metadata in some way
> (as we've defined the way of turning an Identifier into a URI)?

Yes precisely.

> 5. Finally, how do we use DC? When metadata from our registries is
harvested
> to non-astro sites, what do they take: only the DC terms or all of the
> metadata?

They take the DC only.

> And how is OAI related to DC?

Every OAI repository MUST offer DC as one of its metadata formats. This is
how they achieve interoperability of *all* OAI registries. But OAI can also
be extended from DC, by offering custom metadata formats, for example
VOResource.

> Which is pretty much what I have been arguing for.

Oh good. It is also what I have been arguing for. So you owe me a beer then?

Roy