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Add RDF to MDTYPE enumeration #4

Closed thabing closed 10 years ago

thabing commented 10 years ago

Dear All, Would it also be possible to include RDF as a recognised MDTYPE attribute value? At present we are placing this as follows MDTYPE="OTHER" OTHERMDTYPE="RDF" but as we use RDF in all our METS documents it would be nice to have this as a recognised value so that we could place it as follows...

        <METS:mdWrap MDTYPE="RDF">
            <METS:xmlData>
                <rdf:RDF>
                    <rdf:Description>
                            <!--RDF Metadata-->                
                    </rdf:Description>
                </rdf:RDF>
            </METS:xmlData>
        </METS:mdWrap>

Regards, Vicky

National Library of Wales

thabing commented 10 years ago

This request was rejected by the Board:

The METS Editorial Board just met and discussed your change request. The consensus among the Board members was that RDF by itself did not represent a good MDTYPE value. There were two basic issues. One is that RDF is more of a framework or model for representing arbitrary metadata schema, as opposed to a metadata schema itself. For example, RDF is used for lots of different metadata schema; Dublin Core can be represented in RDF, SKOS is an RDF schema, OAI-ORE is an RDF schema, and so is the Open Annotation standard, and many others. So just by using RDF you still have a lot of uncertainty regarding what kind of metadata a section contains. A second argument is that MIMETYPE might be a better way to advertise that the wrapped metadata uses the RDF model, especially since there is an official MIME Type for RDF XML: application/rdf+xml. So for example, if you were wrapping some specific RDF-based metadata schema, you could use something like this:

        <mdWrap MDTYPE="OTHER" MIMETYPE="application/rdf+xml" OTHERMDTYPE="SOME_SPECIFIC_RDF_SCHEMA">
            <xmlData>
                <rdf:RDF>
                    <rdf:Description>
                        <!--RDF Metadata-->                
                    </rdf:Description>
                </rdf:RDF>
            </xmlData>
        </mdWrap>