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Lets assume for a moment that the extensions that Open EBook are sound and would be widely useful for the rest of the community. If we believe that to be true, then we (DCMI) should recognize this as a good thing to do, and promote it to the rest of the community in the form or a best-practice recommendation (while working towards approving a proposal to elevate these qualifiers to approved status). If we see problems, then we should advize them of these, and of course, as Rebecca indicates, they may or may not choose to accept our recommendations. Their use of an XML DTD is perhaps the worst of the obvious three choices (RDF-s, XML-s, or XML DTDs)... it will precule easy interchange of metadata down the road, but I suspect there is nothing that can be done to influence this unless they are looking at alternatives. time will solve it. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Rebecca. stu -----Original Message----- From: Rebecca S. Guenther [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 3:44 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: OEB spec I'm working on the Open Ebook Forum Metadata Working Group. One of our work items is to provide information to the OEB Publication Structure Working Group for revision of its specification. (see: http://www.openebook.org/downloads/OEBPS/index.htm) The OEBPS spec uses Dublin Core metadata. I am currently preparing a document intended to bring theirs up-to-date with the existing Dublin Core specifications. OEBPS uses qualifiers for a few elements, and was written before DCQ. I am advising them to use the approved qualifiers where appropriate. But in addition they require two qualifiers for Creator and Contributor. I am uncertain as to how to advise them; I am tempted to just leave theirs as is, since we so far have no decisions to offer them. One is "role". We are talking about it as an element refinement. They use an element attribute "role= " and the MARC relator codes (not terms, but codes). The other is "file-as". Publishers have a requirement to display the names as they appeared on the piece, and they are saying to use that form for Creator and Contributor. However, they also want the normalized form expressed for indexing purposes, so they have an attribute "file-as". The DC Guide tells people that best practice is to use the inverted form. But what if you need both? And they do want to identify that one is the display form and one the normalized form. So, how to advise them? I'm gathering opinions. However, I have to say that they are very reluctant to change anything in their spec because of backwards compatibility. They may not agree with anything I recommend. And they also need an answer right away and can't wait for a long approval process. So my inclination is to leave it for now, but wanted to get opinions. FYI: they use an XML DTD. And I guess I have no guidance for them on expressing DCQ in XML (or am I missing something-- I didn't see any proposed recommendation for that). Rebecca