Extensibility refers to the ability of creators of information objects to extend the description of their documents with the addition of other existing metadata element sets (e.g. those that may be specific to an institution) outside a single description standard (e.g. Dublin Core). Describers of documents may find that their own institution may need to address other aspects of the document that the Dublin Core does not cover. The institution may add other elements in addition to the Dublin Core, and qualify them by using the "schema identifier" (e.g. FSU for works described for FSU), or provide no qualifer at all.
For example:
Interoperability refers to the ability of different databases (e.g. Library OPACS and the World-Wide_Web) to interact with each other. Functionally it should allow HTML document metadata to be easily converted to MARC format and vice versa. For example, the DC.creator Element might resemble:
<META NAME=DC.creator" CONTENT="Doe, John">and the interoperable mechanism would convert this to MARC:
100; 1 ; $a Doe, John. $
Metadata literally is, data about data. The "data" is information provided as a means to describe an information providing entity. A bibliographic record (information seen on the computer screen of the online library catalog) acts as a document surrogate in OPACs to find materials (e.g. books or journal articles), in the library (or sometimes outside the library). Metadata placed in electronic document <HEAD>s provide the same basic information with the exceptions that it is not visible to the viewer unless he deliberatly looks at it in the Document Source found under the View option, and the user does not need to view the head to find the document.
URN - Uniform Resource Name. A location-independent indentifier for electronic DLOs. A "tag" assigned to a document that is independent to the document, like an ISBN is to a book. URNs have not been implemented as of this publication.
Please send your questions, comments, or suggestions to
gfrost@valdosta.edu
Copyright ©1997 by Guy Frost
Last Updated October 21, 1998