Introduction

Recommendations towards “Updating the Qualified Dublin Core registry in DSpace to the latest standards of the DCMI,” a priority identified in the October 2011 community survey on improving metadata support. It also seeks to comply with the proposal to Standardize the Default Namespace. Discussion of this issue thus far is stored as a DCAT Discussion Forum topic, "Updating the Qualified Dublin Core registry in DSpace."

Glossary of Terms

Main goal of these recommendations

Outstanding issues for committers and community

Possible Phases of Update

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 and committer input)

Relevant JIRA tickets

(please add any JIRA tickets that could be affected by this proposal!)

Would be RESOLVED

DS-433: Update DublinCore Registry to Implement latest DC Standards

DS-805: QDC schema registry needs to be brought into conformity with the current DCMI standards

 

RELATED/Would be AFFECTED

DS-125: Date type can't be repeatable in the submission

DS-202: Metadata Generator Plugin

DS-716: Add an administrative metadata schema to DSpace

DS-800: Manage visibility of metadata fields as field attribute rather than in dspace.cfg 

DS-815: DCDate throws NullPointerException with mangled dates

DS-1134: Multilingual metadata for communities/collections

DS-1420: Exception handling for deleting a metadata field

Areas/processes that will be affected by registry update

What areas and processes will be affected by these shifts? Is there any documentation of what features in DSpace are making use of certain fields? Where will the code be affected? Where are metadata elements hardcoded?

(pulled from September 4, 2012, DCAT discussion)