Andy,
Some comments on your Guidelines for encoding identifiers in DC
document:
I guess that part of your reasons for introducing these guidelines is
to remove the need to add/register new schemes for dc:identifier,
and simliar elements. If they can all be encoded as URIs, that
won't be necessary. However, I'm a bit concerned about whether
the DC community at large will actually follow these guidelines for
common identifiers. People are already writing things like:
<dc:identifier scheme="ISSN">1234-5678</dc:identifier> and
<dc:identifier scheme="DOI">10.1060/abcdefgh</dc:identifier>
I'm not sure that they will change to:
<dc:identifier scheme="URI">urn:issn:1234-5678</dc:identifier> and
<dc:identifier scheme="URI">doi:10.1060/abcdefgh</dc:identifier>
even if it is more accurate. Maybe this doesn't matter!
Following on from that, I can envisage situations within an
application where I would need something like:
<dc:identifier scheme="ISSN">1234-5678</dc:identifier>
for instance, if I needed to index all ISSNs. But I guess in this case
I could use an application-specific element.
These are guidelines for encoding 'commonly used identifiers'.
Maybe the word 'standard' should be used somewhere. All the
ones in the document are, I think, standards. But then I suppose
there will be some common ones which aren't.
Is this document meant to be examples of how to encode such
identifiers? Or is is meant to be a definitive list?
If it is guidelines/examples then something should be said about
other identifiers not mentioned in the document. The problem is
that it's not easy to see what the criterion is for encoding ids this
way. If it is the list maintained by IANA then that doesn't seem to
work too well - some of these are not registered (and the document
is dated 2001-08-20 which doesn't give me too much faith in their
registration process!). What about ids which are not urns - I believe
BICI is one?
If this is a definitive list, then there will be problems with
extensibility, registration, maintenance, etc. I immediately wonder
how to use BICI, OAI, PubMed, etc. Would ids such as oclc-
number be in scope? You certainly wouldn't want to update the
document every time some other significant identifier appeared. So
you'd have to think about some sort of registration - maybe you
envisage the IANA list as providing this but I suspect we'd want ids
not on that list.
Should DC be looking at IRI's rather than URIs with Unicode
inclusion? http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-and-ident.html
I think you may need to include something about escape encoding
in this document. SICIs certainly need it - and your example is
escape-encoded.
Being really picky :), I note that you HTML examples use the form
'DC.Identifier' rather than the preferred 'dc:identifier'!
Does the 'handle system' exist for anything other than DOIs? I don't
think it's in very common usage. I'm not sure it's too helpful to
include it.
I hope some of this is useful. Your document looks like a good
start for guidelines in this area which are very obviously needed.
Best wishes,
Ann
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Mrs. Ann Apps. Senior Analyst - Research & Development, MIMAS,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/ann.html
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