[Dspace-general] How does DSpace support richful metadata such as the record in CiteSeer?

[MacKenzie Smith]

Hi Xiaoyan,

Following up briefly on Scott's reply to you, it's true that DSpace only 
supports
qualified DC now, and the extensions that Scott mentioned are coming in 1.4

Most organizations that have pre-existing "rich" metadata do a simple crosswalk
of that metadata into qDC and throw away the rest, or keep it in a bitstream in
the item alongside the content (publicly accessible or not, your choice, and
full-text indexable, also your choice). We do that with MARC metadata, and
other source metadata that we have lying around...

MIT is doing a project to evaluate how DSpace might support RDF-encoded
descriptive metadata, since that would allow it to handle almost *any* type of
metadata that people want to supply in a standard way, e.g. with faceted
browsing. If you're interested in that work look at http://simile.mit.edu/

But my understanding is that the NSDL doesn't current deal with RDF-encoded
metadata, and neither does OAI (which the NSDL uses to get your metadata)
except that you could write an OAI plugin for any metadata schema including
RDFS. So you could offer your RDF to them but I don't think they would be
able to cope with it *as RDF* right now. You'd have to ask someone in their
core integration team about that...

MacKenzie

At 11:03 AM 3/6/2006 -0500, xiaoyan Yu wrote:
>We are currently uploading data from the CiteSeer collection to DSpace, and
>face the problem of how
>to map richful metadata to something that DSpace can manage well. Further, we
>plan to make the data
>accessible through NSDL, but it is not clear precisely how to use Dublin Core
>with
>qualifiers (e.g., how to apply the ideas of DC-Ed) in a way suitable for NSDL
>(www.nsdl.org).
>
>We suspect that DSpace can only use strings, not RDF, for entries in the
>metadata?
>
>One particular concern is how to map rich information into DSpace records.
>Normally
>we would use DC:creator, but how would we code:
><oai_citeseer:author name="Gabriele Scheler">
>    <address>80290 Munchen , Germany</address>
>    <affiliation>Institut fur Informatik; Technische Universitat
>Munchen</affiliation>
></oai_citeseer:author>
>
>Please advise.
>
>Thanks,
>xiaoyan

MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
MIT Libraries
Building E25-131d
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139
(617)253-8184
kenzie at mit.edu