[OAI-implementers] Reconsidering mandatory DC in OAI-PMH

[Martin Sevigny]

> Carl Lagoze wrote

> 2.  The linkage between Dublin Core and OAI-PMH has been 
> over-emphasized
> at the expense of the utility of OAI-PMH for dissemination of richer,
> and perhaps more useful, structured data.  In some cases data 
> providers
> with richer metadata (e.g., MARC, IEEE LOM) have been forced by the
> requirement to dumb-down rich metadata to Dublin Core and have then
> failed to provide the original metadata.  As a result, the community
> looses the benefits of rich data and is left with the reduced 
> semantics
> of Dublin Core.

I do strongly agree with this statement. Many times, I had to go back at
the basics and try to convince people tha OAI-PMH could transport other
XML data structures then DC.

This strong association has been of great importance in the early and
rapid adoption of OAI, because it (may) remove the burden of agreeing on
data structure for exchange. But I think that since this first step in
the adoption of OAI is now done, it would not cause too much harm to
remove this constraint.

> generalization.  Although removing the Dublin Core 
> requirement would not
> negatively impact existing or future data providers, it may impact
> service providers whose applications depend on the existence of a
> uniform metadata format.

This is the main drawback of it. I personnaly believe that in a real
distributed, multilingual, multivocabulary environment (very realistic
today), the benefits of having a common model as limited as Dublin Core
are not that important.

> 1. Change the Dublin Core requirement to a recommendation.

Agreed.

> 2. Leave oai_dc as a reserved metadataPrefix

Yes, it should.

> 3. Move the oai_dc part of protocol document to Implementation
> Guidelines

OK.

Martin Sévigny
AJLSM
sevigny@ajlsm.com