DCMI Collection Description

Report of Working Group, February 2006

1. Activities and results since Madrid conference

The principal item of the workplan agreed in Madrid [1] is the finalisation of the Application Profile for collection-level description [2]. Four principal outstanding issues were identified; work is in progress on two of these:

1.1 Revise DC CD AP in light of Usage Board comments

A revised draft of the DC CD AP has been circulated. This draft addresses two changes requested by the DCMI Usage Board after their preliminary review of the DC CD AP:

• minor presentational changes, particularly to expand abbreviations
• the introduction of some new properties to address the problem that in the previous version the constraint on the value-space of a property was not consistent with the value-space of a subproperty of that property

1.2 Representing Item Format

Not yet discussed.

1.3 Collection-Location/Collection-Service relationships

An extension [3] to the Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues has been developed by Michael Heaney of the University of Oxford, with the aim of clarifying some of the issues surrounding the differences between the Location of a Collection and the Service which makes a Collection available. The issue is currently under discussion via the mailing list, and opinion seems to be in favour of retaining both the isLocatedAt and isAccessedVia properties.

1.4 Encoding Scheme(s) for Open-Ended Date Ranges

Depends on work by DC Date WG.

2. Further planning and activities for 2006

Progress is now running slightly behind the schedule described in the Workplan.

A proposal to address issue 1.2 will be made during March by the WG chair.

3. Use of Wikis to support WG work

Although the DC CD WG does have a Wiki set up, relatively little use has been made of it. It has been used to capture some example instance metadata descriptions based on the DC CD AP.

The principal working documents of the DC CD WG (the draft application profile and subsidiary documents) had already been created as static HTML pages before the Wiki was installed, and work has continued on the HTML versions. If the work on editing these documents was starting now, authoring might have been carried out using the Wiki (though one of the documents does contain some quite complex tables).

Minor problems have been encountered with Wiki spam.

References

[1] Report of Working Group meeting, 11 October 2004, DC-2005, Madrid. http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0511&L=dc-collections&P=60

[2] DC Collection Description Application Profile. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-application-profile/

[3] An Extension of the Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues into Usage and Transactions. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/model-ext/