Transport XML meta data as well as RDF?

I've just had an interesting conversation with Karen Van Godtsenhoven 
and Patrick Hochstenbach at the University of Gent who are running a 
project called DRIVER [1] - which is concerned with Open Access 
scientific publications. One question raised was whether POWDER could 
transport XML meta elements as well as RDF. Er... well, it's designed to 
transport RDF but I wonder how difficult it would be to add support for 
transporting XML that doesn't get treated as RDF? (there are some very 
well established XML-based metadata systems).

To try and work through an example I looked at the Dublin Core XML 
implementation guide [2], example 4.3 of which is

<metadata
   xmlns="http://example.org/myapp/"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://example.org/myapp/ 
http://example.org/myapp/schema.xsd"
   xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">

   <dc:title>UKOLN</dc:title>
   <dc:description>
     UKOLN is a national focus of expertise in digital information
     management. It provides policy, research and awareness services
     to the UK library, information and cultural heritage communities.
     UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.
   </dc:description>
   <dc:publisher>UKOLN, University of Bath</dc:publisher>
   <dc:identifier>http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/</dc:identifier>
</metadata>

Hmmm... so we have an arbitrary bit of XML that provides data about, in 
this case, UKOLN. POWDER could be useful in associating this data with 
"everything on ukoln.ac.uk" ?

I think all we'd need to do would be to define a new element for our DRs 
of, say, xmldata, and treat it more or less the same as we do tagset and 
descriptorset in that you can have multiple instances of them but you 
must have at least one of tagset, descriptorset or xmldata for the DR to 
be valid. In POWDER-S there would be a class with a property that had 
the XML chunk as its value (RDF has specific support for transporting 
XML as the value of a property).

Something to talk about on our next telecon?

Phil.


[1] http://www.driver-repository.be/
[2] http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2008 11:14:59 UTC