eml-entity/otherEntity - should attributeList be required?

[Chad Berkley]

Hi David,

I think you have a valid point.  Will you enter this in bugzilla so we
can look at it later.  I don't think we should make a change like that
at this point.  Maybe after rc2 gets released.  If it's in bugzilla,
everyone can have a forum to discuss it.

thanks,

chad

On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 16:43, dblankman at lternet.edu wrote:
> 
> While in the process of documenting eml-entity, I was struck by the fact that
> attributeList is required for otherEntityType.
> 
> I would like to suggest that entityDescription is a more likely candidate for a
> required element that simply importing EntityGroup unmodified.
> 
> If, in the absense of an eml=photograph, we are expecting users to use
> otherEntity to document photographs, I think that attributeList should be made
> optional for OtherEntityType. 
> 
> On IRC I asked the question, what is the meaning of "attribute" in the context
> of a photograph. One answer was, a list of RGB values. That might have utility
> for advanced machine processing, but it is not something that a user is going to
> fill out. For a non-georeferenced photographs which LTER information managers
> have indicated that they consider to be data, a description of the photograph
> under entity description makes sense. Saying that a photograph has a single
> attribute and that the attribute is either RGB values or even a description of
> the photograph itself seems to me to be an artificial imposition of unnessary
> structure.
> 
> Since otherEntity is by definition a place holder for an entity that we have not
> defined, it seems to me that trying to fit it into exactly the same structure as
> defined entities is a mistake.
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-- 
-----------------------
Chad Berkley
National Center for 
Ecological Analysis 
and Synthesis (NCEAS)
berkley at nceas.ucsb.edu
-----------------------