Alternative proposal

[Ray Plante]

Hi Tony,

As I alluded before, I can't delay my preparation for the meeting anymore, 
so I haven't been able to fully digest your proposal, yet.  On second 
reading, it sounds like it is an attempt to generalize some of the basic 
ideas from myself and Matthew, so for that reason it is intriguing.

A major concern is how big of an impact this will have on our current 
systems, and I'm still trying to assess this.  In particular, I want to 
understand what changes in our standards and implementations will be 
required.  (Remember, our registry people are right now in the middle of 
rewiring their registries for the current spec.  We would not make friends 
if we told them they would have to go through this again.)

There are currently some natural dividing lines in the schemas that could 
be used to mark out our so-called "selection" metadata.  I agree with Bob 
that there is little gained by slicing up the core Resource metadata--that 
is, in RM parlance, the identity, curation, and content metadata.  It's 
refered to as core for good reason as it is generally applicable and was 
considered during the development of RM as important for providing quality 
descriptions of resources.  However, beyond that set there are some 
natural places to separate out metadata.

Another thing is that we should not let this scheme make the publishing of 
simple resource types overly complex and/or overly dependent on remotely 
accessed data.  Resources like Authority really need its extension 
metadata included directly directly in all registries.  Similarly, we 
will always need the full coordinate system definition to appear in a 
StandardSTC record or the coordinate system referenceing schema it serves 
will not work.

cheers,
Ray