EML 2.0 and packaging

[Matt Jones]

Hi Corinna,

Thanks for the comments.  Except for the comparison to the evil empire, 
I think they were quite constructive :)

Some points and food for thought:
   1) I disagree about your claim that we need proprietary software to 
handle the existing version of EML. Any XML editor can be used to edit 
EML documents -- it is totally misleading to say that generic XML 
editing software can not be used for EML.  I use XML Spy all the time to 
edit EML documents.  I also generate EML in perl and java using standard 
XML parsing libraries.  We are making fullest possible use of the 
software available, both commercial and open source.
   2) our "triple" element is simply an RDF statement, and as such is 1) 
recommended practice by the W3C, and is well known approach to modeling. 
  It is far from proprietary.
   3) The minor additional intellectual capital needed to understand the 
semantics of the triple element is minor compared to the subtleties in 
the rest of EML  -- application developers can deal with it easily, and 
the user need not ever really know about it.
   4) I agree with you that we have not gone far enough in normalizing 
EML.  In particular, the various uses of eml-party should be linked in 
via triples, as should the uses of eml-coverage.  Maybe others.  The 
question then arises, why not go to a full-blown RDF model for all of 
the metadata, so that absolutely everything is in a triple format.  It 
certainly is the approach that the W3C has converged on for arbitrary 
metadata.  We could even use RDF/S to model EML so that the proper 
constraints can be established.

Cheers,
Matt

Corinna Gries wrote
> proprietary software. To me this looks a little bit like a Microsoft 
> approach of locking people into a software package.

-- 
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Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439   Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)

Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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