All,

Apologies for the break in activity recently.

The plan is still to finalise a first edition of the DC CD AP for review
by the DCMI Usage Board at their meeting before the DC-2006 conference
in Mexico at the start of October.

I think we are still on course to achieve this. 

The two main issues outstanding from the workplan - see [1] - are

(1) representing the assertion that a collection contains some items of
a specified media-type/format (DCAP issue 2 on the Workplan)
- I'll circulate a suggestion for this today.

(2) develop/select vocabulary and/or syntax encoding schemes that
support open-ended date ranges
- This is a work item for the DC Date WG [2], so I'll try to find out
what the state of play is.

On the question of syntax, two working drafts have recently been made
available for comment by members of the DC Architecture WG [3, 4]. These
two specs support the representation - using XML and RDF, respectively -
of all the features of the DCMI Abstract Model which are used in the DC
CD AP. So if the DCMI community supports those two specs, then our job
is only to point to those documents, and maybe produce a few examples of
descriptions based on the DC CD AP to illustrate their use.

In addition, I would suggest that we should also:

(3) (briefly!) review the classes recommended as Vocabulary Encoding
Schemes to ensure that they are consistent with the DCMI Usage Board's
draft proposals for ranges for DCMI properties [5]. I should emphasise
that those have not yet been adopted/approved, but I think it would be
wise to ensure we aren't recommending anything which is in clear
contradiction with the UB's thinking. We should not encounter problems,
because this information is already implicit in the hunman-readable
definitions of the DCMI properties. 

(4) review the human-readable guidelines provided for the use of each
property to ensure that they are
- appropriate/usable/complete etc!
- consistent with the guidelines for the use of other properties
referenced in this DCAP
- consistent with more general DCMI guidance for the use of the property
- consistent with the DCMI Abstract Model

Finally, my understanding is that the Usage Board has revised its
"process" guideline to reflect the shift towards evaluating potential
new terms through their use in the context of a DC Application Profile,
rather than as stand-alone "term proposals". See

http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/process/

especially sections 6 and 7.

I'm slightly unsure about what, if any, "term-specific" documentation we
will be required to provide, in addition to the descriptions provided
within the main description of the DC CD AP itself. I'm also not sure
whether this reflects any change in the UB position on assigning URIs
for classes to be used as Vocabulary Encoding Schemes (e.g. the classes
for AccrualPolicy etc which we proposed some time ago) and for
terms/values within those classes. 

Pete

[1] http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/
[2]
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0511&L=dc-date&P=159
[3] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml/
[4] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-rdf/
[5] http://dublincore.org/usageboardwiki/PropertyDomainsAndRanges

---
Pete Johnston
Technical Researcher, Eduserv Foundation
Web: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
Email: [log in to unmask] 
Tel: +44 (0)1225 474323