Record Schema: revised draft

A revised draft of the  Record Source Schema is at:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950/agency/defns/recsrc.html

This schema definition was approved at the July ZIG meeting, subject to the
following change: the url for a source record need not necessarily be a Z39.50
url;  multiple urls may be supplied (actually, URIs), in the case where multiple
URIs  (possibly of different types) exist for the record.

The definition has been revised, for review. Please consider the following
question. Suppose two or more URIs are supplied by a surrogate record. Should
the client assume that they all identify the same source record (i.e. at the
same server)? Or,  should it be possible for the intermediary, having decided
that two or more records on different source servers are duplicates, to supply,
within a single surrogate record,URIs to these multiple records?  It seems to me
that this would be a very useful feature, but it presents additional compexity:
how would the client be able to distinguish these two cases, that is, whether
two URIs identify the same source record (at the same server) or duplicate
records at different servers (assuming that these URIs aren't neccessarily urls,
and thus don't necessarily expose location information)?   One possible approach
to this is to preclude de-duplication *across servers*, unless explicitly
requested, via the de-duplication service, and then formulate some criteria
allowing the intermediary to cluster duplicate records on different servers,
while discarding duplicates on a given server.

Please think about this and comment.

--
Ray Denenberg
Library of Congress
rden@loc.gov
202-707-5795

Received on Thursday, 24 August 2000 14:46:00 UTC