Pages concept

[Kate Ord <kateo@erin.gov.au>]

Firstly let me introduce myself. I work in ERIN in the Regional Information 
Section focussing on Comprehensive Regional Assessements on Australia's 
forests. I have a keen interest in metadata and am a new member of the ANZLIC 
Working Group on Metadata.

John Hockaday and Kim Finney have both written to the discussion list with
criticsms of the "pages concept" 
 
> I believe that this "pages" method is NOT the right structure for users
> to add extra fields to the metadata.
...
> It would become too confusing to have to go down through many pages to
> find an extra field related to the same category just because it was
> not an ANZLIC field. 

I believe there is a misunderstanding of the "Pages" concept.  The pages 
concept does not refer to actual pages of a report either on the Web or in 
hardcopy of the text. Perhaps the use of the word "page" is not appropriate.

I believe the concept refers to a hierarchy of metadata fields to reflect 
different directory and management requirements, not the actual structure 
of how the metadata is stored or reported.

> 
> I believe that the extra data would probably be related to the current
> ANZLIC categories (eg dataset, description, data currency etc) and
> therefore would be more useful if they were included in these areas.
> If the extra metadata did not fall into one of these categories then
> an extra category could be added at the end of the metadata report. 
>

"This additional information may be in the form of sub-elements of Specific 
Page 0 core metadata elements or entirely new and unrelated metadata elements."

        Page 11, Metadata Guidelines Version 1 July 1996

The text of the Guidelines agree completely with John's suggestion to include 
other "page" metadata where it most appropriately fits and not in some spurious 
category at the end of the metadata report.

John and Kim have raised important issues about how the core metadata fits 
within existing metadata collected for theme and internal directory use and
what this means in terms of supplying metadata to one another.  The Working 
Group is examining a variety of proposals for a national directory.  
One of these includes a distributed directory where custodians store metadata 
in whatever form they wish and mark up SGML documents for each record which 
can be indexed and searched at different locations across the Web (much like 
the "Blue Pages").

As part of this proposal, the Working Group is attempting to define an agreed 
structure for these SGML files.  A draft proposal will be sent to the list 
shortly explaining what SGML is, why it is useful, a document type definition 
(DTD) for a standard ANZLIC SGML format and worked examples. 

The issue John has raised is being examined for these SGML files.
SGML allows the user to have a number of different fields for different 
purposes in the one document. They are just tagged appropriately. This means 
you need only write one SGML file and query scripts can be written to extract
only the metadata fields appropriate to that directory.

Looking forward to more opinions on this one.

Cheers,

Kate

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Kate Ord
Scientific Coordinator
ERIN Regional Information Section
Environment Forest Taskforce
Environment Australia
GPO Box 787
Canberra  ACT 2601

ph:	(06) 274 1111	Int. ph:    +61-6-274 1111
fax:	(06) 274 1333	Int. fax:   +61-6-274 1333
email:	kateo@erin.gov.au

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