> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Sanderson [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 2:44 PM
>
> Jeff's original plan was to have oai.identifier, oai.datestamp and
> oai.set, but recently we've talked about dc.identifier with a scope
> of record metadata (as opposed to OAI's use of 'metadata' meaning record)

I really don't like the "metadata" qualifier.  It's confusing and starts us
down a slippery slope of defining the difference between data and metadata,
especially when the data IS metadata.  The OAI identifier and the DC
identifier might or might not be the same.  Let's not confuse them
unnecessarily.


> oai.set isn't contentious, even though the semantics are similar to that
> of cql.resultSetId, as we don't have any defined semantics for scanning
> that special index (among other reasons)

oai.set is only vaguely like resultSetId.  It is usually a crude searching
mechanism on OAI repositories, allowing for the extraction of records with
particular features.  On a repository of MARC records, I could have, Book,
Serial and Authority sets.  Some OAI implementations allow the use of sets
for dynamic searching, not just the static predefined sets that the standard
calls for.


> But recently there has also been the discussion regarding dublin core as
> record schema and dublin core as defining semantics for indexes.
>
> It seems like a very good time to make a decision about all of this, such
> that we don't end up with many many context sets all defining something
> called 'title' or some defining 'author', some 'creator', some
> 'personName' etc. etc. multiple times, once at each metadata level they
> can think of.

I'm still waiting for a concrete proposal that I can object to.

I'm sorry to hear about Eliot's confusion about searching on dc.title in a
MARC database and not seeing his word in the title field.  Sadly, the exact
same thing happens in every MARC database, whether you use SRW or not.  When
you search the title index in WorldCat in our FirstSearch system, we map a
zillion (conservatively) fields to the title index.  Users somehow seem to
understand this and actually seem to prefer it to having to specify
themselves all the possible fields that might have title information in
them.

Eliot's real problem was that he was retrieving an incomplete record and
couldn't see where his data came from.  I'd be completely in favor of having
a way in the Explain record to specify the schema that best returns the
record.

Ralph