Re: requesting XML records

>>> Mike Taylor <mike@indexdata.com> 25-03-03 22:35 >>>
>
>I don't see a scaling problem with this at all -- in fact, I'd have
>thought scalability was one of the _strengths_ of this approach.  (The
>only problem is that, since the DCMI steadfastly refuse to define an
>XML Schema for Dublin Core, a dozen different projects are busily at
>work defining their own, subtly incompatible, versions.)
>
The real problem is that XML schemas are not sufficient to express what you what to express. We had ta similar discussion also at the ZNG list. There should be a way (a generic more schema) to request DC records without caring about the small differences in different versions.
Everyone knows that DC is not sufficient for many applications and people start using application profiles for that reason. I would like to be able to request others DC XML records encoded according to the DCMI guidelines, but at the same time I want to accept the differences coming from different application profiles. As soon as someone introduces a new term the application can decide whether or not to inform the user about this unknown term and in some case this term is valuable enough to change that application to do something meaningful with that new term. 
The alternative is that we have thousands of "subtly incompatible, versions" that we are not aware of and therefor we will never be able to request them.

Theo

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 2003 03:43:47 UTC