Current Issues with DC Collection Description Application
Profile, May 2005

Pete Johnston, 2005-05-11

1. Clarifying the distinction between the isLocatedAt
(Collection-Location) and isAccessedVia (Collection-Service)
relationships

Mike Heaney (who developed the Entity-Relation Model on which
the RSLP CD schema and the DC CD AP is based) is currently
working on an extension to the model to address this. We
(some UKOLN-folk) have seen a draft, and the final document
is due within the next couple of weeks. This document will
be circulated to the DC CD WG and the definitions of the
properties may be amended as a result.

2. One-to-One rule concerns

It was suggested that a functional requirement for the DC CD
AP was that it should support the discovery of collections
according to the media-type of the items within the collection
e.g. a collection containing (a significant proportion of)
items of mp3 format etc.

The WG has not resolved how to express this information,
within the constraints of the one-to-one rule (the format
of an item is not the format of acollection). And there have
been some suggestions that it may not be a requirement.

This issue is currently under discussion on the WG mailing list
[1].

3. Date Formats

Finalising the DC CD AP depends on DC Date WG and/or Usage
Board finalising work on date encoding schemes which support
date ranges and approximate dates. The DC CD WG would welcome
an update on progress.

4. Identifiers for terms

The development of the DC CD AP has resulted in the creation of
several new metadata terms not currently available in other
vocabularies. Although (in most cases, at least), the WG
has agreed on the definitions of these terms, they have not
yet been assigned persistent URIs because a suitable naming
authority and/or maintenanace authority has not been found.

A proposal has been made that the DC CD WG, or an agency
acting on its behalf, should obtain a PURL top-level domain
and assign some suitable PURLs for these terms now, with the
intention of seeking an organisation to take over the longer
term maintenanace of the terms [2].

[1] http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0505&L=dc-collections&T=0&F=&S=&P=55
[2] http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0504&L=dc-collections&T=0&F=&S=&P=562