DC comments & questions

[Ray Plante]

Hi Tony,

On Sun, 5 Oct 2003, Tony Linde wrote:
> 1. I see in the schemas that DC-related elements are annotated with
> <vm:dcterm> elements - how are these to be used? And ought we to be
> namespacing to DC instead?

This is part of some markup I've been experimenting with to aid with
automated processing of schemas.  Since it is contained within
"xs:annotation/xs:appinfo" elements, it has no effect on the
definition of the schema or one's ability to validate it.  

The purpose of this particular markup, <vm:dcterm>, is to tag elements
that correspond to Dublin Core terms.  The content is the DC term the
element maps to.  A documentation generator, then, can include this
characteristic into the documentation.

> 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?

Roy mostly answered this.  I want to add, though, for every DC term we 
support (apart from the Identfier), there is an element that contains a 
simple string value.  For example, a value for the DC Publisher term can 
be found in "Curation/Publisher/Title".  

> 3. Should we, like PDS, block all our DC terms into a single complex type? 

I don't see this as helpful: 
  *  It does not make automated ingesting of DC metadata any easier
     (as programmer still must handle the conversion).
  *  It would break up the organization of our concepts.
  *  It would make extending the schemas more difficult.
  
> 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)?

I believe that Identifier is the only such example.  

cheers,
Ray