EML questions

[Xiaoping Wang]

Dear Matt,

I am currently magging our FGDC metadata into EML metadata, and I come 
up with the following questions about the use of EML schemas 
(particularly the dataset schema).  I need you help to resolve these 
problems.

1. For the Temporal Coverage, how to describe multiple points in time 
(e.g. 1968, 1978, 1986, 1999, 2004)?  Based on EML specification, 
singleDateTime is used to describe single point in time and rangeOfDates 
is used to describe range of dates.

2. For the rangeOfDates, the domain of both beginDate <#beginDate> and 
endDate is date.  For some of our date ranges, however, we only know the 
beginDate but not the endDate because the projects have not completed 
yet.  For now, we are using 8888 for endDate to represent this 
situation.  I am just wondering if you can suggest a better way to 
handle this kind of situation. <#endDate>

3. FGDC has a field called "Metadata Date" to reference the date that 
the metadata were created or last updated.  How can I map this 
inforamtion into EML?  It seems to me that all "date" elements are 
associated with the dataset itself (or data sources), but not the 
metadata records.

Thank you very much for your kind assistance!

Xiaoping Wang

PMEL/NOAA