Relating marked up resources to software

[Gary Simons]

On 09/19/2001, Michel Jacobson posted to OLAC Implementers re: "The
metadata of the LACITO Archive  are now coded in OLAC". I just found this
in a pocket of unread email and want to comment on one point:

>Remark:  In formatting our metadata in OLAC, we felt the need for a
>convention allowing us to specify the software tools which we provide for
>processing certain resources. In particular, we provide specialized
>stylesheets, etc., for processing our XML documents. A possible solution
>would be to link the XML resource to a software resource via the
<Relation>
>element. The current definition of this element would require us to code
>the OAI identifier of the software resource as its content, e.g.:
><Relation>oai:lacito:myPgm</Relation>. However, this leaves open the
>question of how the user is to call the software tool and apply it to a
>given XML resource. A non elegant solution might be to create an OAI
>identifier for each way the software in question can be called. Some
>extension of the semantics of the Relation element or of the controlled
>vocabulary of its attribute may be desirable for this purpose.

The solution that the current draft of the metadata standard recommends
(which was released a month after Michel's posting) is to use indirect
linkage via the <format.markup> element.  That is, rather than the text
resource saying <Relation>oai:lacito:myPgm</Relation>, it would say
<format.markup>oai:lacito:myDTD</format.markup>. Then the stylesheet would
also be a deposited resource with the very same <format.markup>
declaration, since it is a resource that is related to the very same DTD.
The trick then is that our community's centralized catalog service provider
should set relations in the relational database it harvests into between
resources and the markup scheme they use.  That service provider would then
be able to augment its report on the DTD itself by listing all the
cataloged resources by type (e.g. text vs. stylesheet) that are related to
the DTD.  This would get us from any text that uses a particular DTD to any
stylesheet that has been designed for it (of which there could be dozens
contributed by different developers in different archives), even though the
archive depositing the text doesn't know about the other stylesheets.

Hope this makes sense,
-Gary Simons