- I think the ZNG list should be open for everyone but should still
require people to join via Ray befor sending contributions.

- I agree with Bill Oldroyd that it should also be possible retrieve
fullr records  via a record id, additionallly to to requesting them via
a position in a resultset. The recordid should become part of the
SRU/SRW specifications as request parameter and in the SRU/SRW response.


- With respect to metasearching of several databases on the same system
I think it would be a good step forwards to have a parameter in which we
can specify database names or collection names. When the database name
is returned as a parameter (like recordid) for each record the receiver
can use this for sorting records from different databases.

-   There has been a discussion on the Z39.50 list some time ago with
respect to requesting XML records. I mentioned the idea on DCX: Dublin
Core eXtended. Especially in metasearching the DCX concept can be
valuable. The concept of DCX is explained below and I will submit a
proposal to the DCMI to adopt this concept. I would like to propose
support of DCX (rather than DC) as compulsary in SRU/SRW.
Please give me your opnion on this.

Theo


DCX:
The problem is that there will grow lots of services where DC plus
extensions is being used. The number of slightly different schemas or
metadata application profiles can grow dramatically and it becomes more
difficult for applications to now which schema to request or to provide
in case of metasearching. At the same time most many applications are
capable of ignoring terms that they do not understand and only using
terms that they do understand. To allow the exchange of records with
different schemas but sharing Qualified Dublin Core terms the "DCX"
schema is invented.
DCX means that the XML records are encoding according to the DCMI
guidelines and contain terms from the dc and dcterms namespaces. The
records may contain terms from other namespaces when they could not -
within reason - be expressed by terms from the dc and dcterms
namespaces. It is recommended that as much as possible terms from DCMI
registered elementsets are being used.

So in practice: when a client requests for recordSchema=dcx the server
will return dcx as recordSchema without the need to strip terms that are
not qualified dc and regardless of the schema or application profile
actually being used (as long as it also uses dc). To harmonize the
addition of new terms a registry (or perhaps several) should be
available to store submitted proposals for new terms.