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Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
One thing I
> think I feel like we've learned from many of our community's recent
> metadata initiatives is the importance of creating standards in such a
> way that they can be further developed and/or extended in a backwards
> compatible way. Ie, an OpenURL 1.1 or something, that was backwards
> comptable so it could be sent to resolvers that knew no more than 1.0
> without problems. This has to do with both the design of the
> structure/syntax of the metadata, as well as the design of the
> _processes_ of maintenance, to make this kind of extension and
> development not too cumbersome socially.

In theory (yes, in theory) the OPenURL is highly extensible because of
the combination of registry entries and profiles. This means that if you
want to create a new set of metadata definitions that allow multiple
ISBNs you can register that on the site with a unique name. That's the
easy part. What is possibly more difficult is that you have to create a
new profile (SAP 1.1?) that then incorporates that metadata set. You
can't just add another data element (or make changes to the data
elements) in the KEV Book format.

Yet, since our discussion about the fact that an OpenURL does not convey
the information about which profile it is conforming to, this latter
step (the creation of new profile) rather boggles my mind. But your
OpenURL (or COinS) would be clearly identifying the rft_val_fmt that
represents the new metadata set.

If you look at the registry you can see that there are more than a
handful of KEV metadata formats that have been added and are listed as
"Trial Use."

kc


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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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