Jonathan Rochkind wrote: One thing I
think I feel like we've learned from many of our community's recent metadata initiatives is the importance of creating standards in such a way that they can be further developed and/or extended in a backwards compatible way. Ie, an OpenURL 1.1 or something, that was backwards comptable so it could be sent to resolvers that knew no more than 1.0 without problems. This has to do with both the design of the structure/syntax of the metadata, as well as the design of the _processes_ of maintenance, to make this kind of extension and development not too cumbersome socially.
In theory (yes, in theory) the OPenURL is highly extensible because of the combination of registry entries and profiles. This means that if you want to create a new set of metadata definitions that allow multiple ISBNs you can register that on the site with a unique name. That's the easy part. What is possibly more difficult is that you have to create a new profile (SAP 1.1?) that then incorporates that metadata set. You can't just add another data element (or make changes to the data elements) in the KEV Book format. Yet, since our discussion about the fact that an OpenURL does not convey the information about which profile it is conforming to, this latter step (the creation of new profile) rather boggles my mind. But your OpenURL (or COinS) would be clearly identifying the rft_val_fmt that represents the new metadata set. If you look at the registry you can see that there are more than a handful of KEV metadata formats that have been added and are listed as "Trial Use." kc -- ----------------------------------- Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kcoyle.net ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet fx.: 510-848-3913 mo.: 510-435-8234 ------------------------------------
