Theo,

I agree with you that when a portal discovers a collection of interest
it wants to be able to access that service on behalf of the end-user,
possibly to include it in a list of search targets. But I don't agree
with you that is is simple to include metadata for this.

Your suggestion is to include the service access information, such
as the baseURL, format and query language, in the collection
description. But it seems to me that that only works in a simple
model where a collection has only one service access point. In
reality collections have several different access methods (eg
Z39.50, OAI-PMH, SOAP/XQUERY, simple CGI, OpenURL). I
realise not all of these are suitable for cross-searching but they are
valuable metadata related to the collection. As soon as you try to
record more than one service access method you find it cannot be
done in a flat list of collection description properties. You have to
record the service metadata separately, linked from the collection
description using a hasLocation (or hasService) property.

So while I agree that it is an area of research that is of interest to
others - it relates to work within the UK on a collection/service
registry - I don't really believe it can be standardised quickly.

It is certainly an area this group could look into. But I guess we
need to agree on 'standardising' the collection description
properties first.

Best wishes,
        Ann


Date sent:              Mon, 30 Jun 2003 10:34:26 +0200
Send reply to:          DCMI Collection Description Group <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   Theo van Veen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                [DC-COLLECTIONS] collections and services
To:                     [log in to unmask]

> Last friday I sent a contribution to this list with respect to
> collection description metadata and services. I would like to point
> out one thing that may be quite relevant. The way we want to use
> collection/service descriptions is such that whenever and wherever a
> user finds one or more descriptions of collections and services, a
> portal should be a able to use the descriptions for providing a new
> list of search targets. Therefore the description metadata should
> contain the information that is relevant for this purpose. So when he
> finds an interesting collection the portal needs to find oud which
> service can be used to search the metadata describing the objects and
> in which format and which query language to use etc. In my view the
> best approach is to add these type of metadata to the collection
> description. The mechanism is quite simple and when we agree on the
> metadata this concept us usable by anybody. For example suppose you
> have your own portal or gateway for distributed searching and you find
> in the European Library some relevant collection descriptions. With
> the approach that I propose your portal will be able to use these
> collection descriptions for searching in the corresponding metadata
> databases and offer these as targets for searching. In The European
> Library testinterface this concept is being used.
>
> I would like to have opinions and feedback on our approach and I want
> to know whether the DC-COLLECTIONS working group wants to adapt this.
> Especially when others are interested in this idea we need to
> standardize on this aspect of collection descriptions as soon as
> possible.
>
> Theo
>


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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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