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Main goal of these recommendations:

• Take steps toward The ultimate goal of full compliance with DCTERMSthese recommendations is to implement fully functional DCTERMS as the default metadata schema, thus ensuring compliance with current standards endorsed by DCMI and linked data capabilities, and enabling a metadata infrastructure that supports other hierarchical and relational data structures. 
• These recommendations also provide for intermediate steps towards this ultimate goal. 
  
  • By bringing the existing default 'dc'
  (QDC) schema 
  • schema into
  QDC
  • compliance with the Qualified Dublin Core standard, we
  also
  • provide an intermediate migration step, enabling repositories to meet compliance with QDC upon upgrade, which will ease the transition to DCTERMS. (See "Possible Phases of Update," below, for further details about staging.
  • By locking down schemas at the element level, we ensure compliance with QDC and DCTERMS standards but provide tools to allow customizations not compliant with QDC/DCTERMS to persist in local schema. 

Outstanding issues for committers and community:

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• Is it possible to ultimately implement DCTERMS with full functionality? What changes to the data model will be necessary?
• If both QDC and DCTERMS are included, which will be considered the default? Is this projected to change?
• How will this proposal integrate with other suggested changes to DSpace metadata, including Proposal for Metadata Enhancement? How might it affect integration with Fedora? How might it affect other desired changes to metadata in DSpace, including implementing functional structured metadata such as MODS, METS, and PREMIS?
• What challenges will this proposal present—or solve—for harvesting?
• To enable repositories to migrate existing metadata to QDC and DCTERMS schemas, we will need to develop robust tools for repositories to deploy. One outstanding issue is the design and development of these tools.  
• Need help on how best to map between schemas - QDC vs. DCTERMS schemas and how they will work together  

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• .   

Possible Phases of Update:

1) Move to DCTERMS

Update current default 'dc' schema in metadata registry to latest qualified Dublin Core, add 'dcterms' and 'local' as parallel schemas in registry, goal = 'dcterms' schema as metadata registry default schema

1) Update "dc" registry that ships with DSpace to Qualified Dublin Core (QDC) standard.

 2) Provide tools for migrating "dc" elements not compliant with QDC to "local" registry. "dc" registry is thus upgraded and replaced by "QDC" registry. "dc" elements are migrated to "QDC" registry (where compliant with that standard) or pushed to "local" registry.

3) Develop and implement flat "DCTERMS" registry. 

4) Ship DSpace with "QDC," "DCTERMS," and "local" registry. Provide tools for current DSpace repositories to migrate into these registries, if desirable. Map out relationships between these three registries, and establish default registry.

5) Plan for migration from "QDC" to "DCTERMS" as default registry.

6) Develop "DCTERMS" as fully functional default registry in DSpace, with range and domain values enabled and formally assigned. Provide tools for migration from "QDC."

7) Celebrate. 

Recommendation (tentative, pending further community input):

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