Lorna said:
> The original objectives of the UK LOM Core were as follows:
> * To record common practice
> * To provide guidelines for metadata creators
> * To identify UK specific vocabularies
> * To identify a minimum core element set that would
> facilitate interoperability when metadata records are exchanged.
>
> Phil hit on this final point when he noted that much of this
> recent discussion has focused on the provision or creation of
> metadata, rather than its exchange. Scott's comment
> regarding work flow also relate to
> this issue. To facilitate interoperability compliance to any
> profile, specification or standard becomes a necessity at the
> point of exchange. Technically, how you create, aggregate
> and store the metadata before it is exchanged is a community
> or application specific workflow issue.
>
> However the UK LOM Core can not ignore this issue as its
> intention is to provide guidance for both the creation and
> exchange of metadata. Personally I rather like Phil's
> suggestion that we adopt an approach similar to WAI and have
> different levels of conformance. I'd be very keen to hear
> the SIGs opinion of this suggestion.
Hmmm, I'm not quite sure about the distinction being made here between
"provision" and "exchange": the point of one service "providing"
metadata is to enable another service to consume/use it.
But yes, something I was turning over after reading Andy's initial
message on this thread (and which I think is also touched on in John
Casey's comment about a repository requiring the "full monty" and Scott
Wilson's comment on "prior agreement" about data exchanged between
services) is whether there is a potential tension here between the
requirements/preferences of a (in OAI-PMH terms) "data provider" (the
agent who provides/exposes metadata) - "you can't really expect me to
provide *all* this stuff!" - and those of a "service provider" that uses
that metadata as the basis of a new service - "I'd really quite like to
rely on having present all those elements that UK LOM Core says is
mandatory".
I don't have an answer for how to resolve that tension! ;-)
As an aside, I tend to see LOM Application Profiles (and indeed metadata
application profiles more generally) as specifications for metadata
which is exposed by/exchanged between/consumed by services - _not_ for
how the metadata is managed internally to an application. Those two
things may be quite similar, but they may be quite different - a service
provider is not really interested in whether the content/value of any
individual data element is generated on the fly by a data provider's
software or whether it's been created by a human metadata author.
Pete
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