Hi there,
Another currently deployed metadata structure that will describe resources
both on- and offline is the GILS (Government/Global Information Locator
Service) profile (<http://www.usgs.gov/gils/>). A GILS "locator record"
contains descriptive elements which can be viewed as a superset of
"unstructured" DC (in fact, the GILS community tracks the DC effort
carefully and has modified element names along the way to keep in synch).
However, it contains an "availability" element, which is specifically
intended to reference practically any type of resource - online document or
database; offline printed document; organisation or individual person. Of
course, the same resource can be available in multiple forms, and at
varying cost.
GILS is primarily a structure intended for online searching of databases
(and as such, it is married to the Z39.50 Information Retrieval standard),
but the abstract record structure makes a good "container" for the exchange
of metadata. We have frequently used GILS as a practical method to deploy
DC-like data in a searching/information discovery application.
--Sebastian
|