documentation question.

[Peter McCartney]

where i say "definition" i meant <description> . sorry for the confusion.
 

Peter McCartney (peter.mccartney at asu.edu)
Center for Environmental Studies
Arizona State University
480-965-6791 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter McCartney [mailto:peter.mccartney at asu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 2:47 PM
To: Eml-Dev (E-mail)
Subject: documentation question.



I have some questions about filling in eml-documentation since im not sure
im interpreting things right and eml-documentation.xsd is not, ummm,
documented :)

1) lineage. My expectation was that this was an identification of the
original source of an element. As im reading through other people's
documentation entries, it seems to be used more for a record of what version
of EML an element first appears in. I filled the lineage field for
spatialReference as "FGDC-STD-001-1998" since each element was taken from
that source and i did not change any element names. is the point to document
the source definition or just its history vis a vis EML? however, what if i
use an element from an existing standard but modify it somewhat (drop or add
elements from its content model, but leave a substantial amount of the
content intact? should we have a standard format such as "EML 2.0, modified
from ISO 19115.3 A.2.3.4"?


2) it seems like we could trim some verbage and standardize some of the
entries. I'm not sure <lineage>New in EML 2.0</lineage> tells me anything
more than <lineage>EML 2.0</lineage>. When this appears in EML 4.0 will we
still say "New in EML 2.0" or will we change it to "Was introduced in EML
2.0"  as i see being done for some elements from EML 1.x ?.  in a similar
manner, it seems like we could standardize on what we put in the Example
element (if anything) for complex elements and elements based on complex
types rather than a wordy phrase like "See content models for associated
elements" or something like that.  

3) is it necessary to have a definition for every element? for most of the
elements from ISO and fgdc, all that was provided was a short phrase that
seems to fit best in summary. if our only choice is to repeate that in
description or leave description blank, which is better?



Peter McCartney (peter.mccartney at asu.edu) 
Center for Environmental Studies 
Arizona State University 
480-965-6791 

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