Dear friends,

I have received this request for information from our friends at USC.
Although we have not as yet used DLF-announce to identify information in
quite this way, it seems entirely appropriate given the nature of our
collaboratory.

Please direct any responses you have to USC's query to Deborah Holmes-Wong
([log in to unmask])

Kind regards,
Dan



The University of Southern California is currently involved in the process
of developing a collection information system for its digital library that
will be delivered over the Web and could eventually scale to many millions
of items.

We have a small group examining XML as the format we use to store and share
our metadata. We use qualified Dublin Core as the basis for our metadata. In
the process of trying to get a variety of collections into Dublin Core, we
have come up with many local qualifiers. The Dublin Core Initiative may
support some of them some day. Others may never be supported. We realize
that this complicates things.

Because we use qualified Dublin Core, when we began our research, we found
that the Dublin Core Initiative was developing a DCQ schema in XML/RDF. We
have since learned about problems with that schema. We are still
considering using XML/RDF for the schema, but we're not sure if we should
move forward with development of an XML schema now that does not use RDF and
wait for RDF to develop, or whether we should move ahead with development of
an RDF schema. We realize that there would be a cost associated with moving
to RDF later.

We are wondering if you have any opinions on which approach to take.
Answers to the following questions will help us decide.

1) Is there any support in the digital library community for the use of
qualified Dublin Core in XML RDF? Are any of you aware of other digital
library applications using XML/RDF schema for metadata (or even digital
assets themselves)?

2) Do you have any serious reservations (or enthusiastic opinions) about
using XML/RDF in this type of application?

3) Do you know of a way of expressing RDF that would support qualified
Dublin Core? When we parse qualified Dublin Core we lose its hierarchical
structure.  Which parsers would you suggest using to avoid this?

4) In the future, will RDF allow us to continue to use our local qualifiers
and/or namespaces?

Many thanks in advance for your assistance with this. When we have a schema
either in XML or XML RDF for qualified Dublin Core, we will make it
available for your critique.

Please send responses to:

Deborah Holmes-Wong
Project Manager, Digital Information Management
University of Southern California
[log in to unmask]

Thanks