<p>Hi Jeroen and Jo</p>
<p>2007/6/17, Jeroen Ticheler <<a href="mailto:Jeroen.Ticheler@fao.org">Jeroen.Ticheler@fao.org</a>>:<br>> Dear Jo,<br>> Good to hear from you!</p>
<p>Good about some news form the metadata sphere! You know that I'm still waiting for a useful geospatial metadata harvesting protocol. My current default answer for jump starters still is OAI which offers Dublin Core as model and OAI/XML as the encoding (see also
e.g. <a href="http://en.scientificcommons.org/register-repository">http://en.scientificcommons.org/register-repository</a>). Whereas OSGeo's DClite4G gives a more GIS oriented and more useful model but still lacks an encoding (Jo: Please correct me).
</p>
<div>If MEF reaches out, I would be more than happy. Now, after some glimpse on the reference (here: <a href="http://urlx.org/sourceforge.net/bd43f">http://urlx.org/sourceforge.net/bd43f</a>) I got some questions about which model and encoding are offered "off the shelf": From the section of the reference which describes the
info.xml, more specific, the schema element: </div>
<div> </div>
<div>"Indicates the metadata's schema. The value can be assigned as will but if the schema is one of those describe below, that value must be used:</div>
<div>* dublin-core : A metadata in the dublin core format as described in <a href="http://dublincore.org/">http://dublincore.org</a><br>* fgdc-std : A metadata in the Federal Geographic Data Committee.<br>* iso19115 : A metadata in the ISO 19115 format
<br>* iso19139 : A metadata in the ISO 19115/2003 format for which the ISO19139 is the XML encoding."</div>
<p>My questions:</p>
<p>1. Dublin Core (DC): DC has no single or default encoding (c.f. <a href="http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/">http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/</a>). Which is the encoding you propose and what's the semantics of dc:coverage?
</p>
<p>2. iso19115: Which encoding (if not iso19139)?</p>
<p>3. I would be very interested in some XML sample files of the most used format within GN (iso19139?) with all attributes filled in, which either are mandatory, or have been proven 'useful' in GN (I'm thinking of thumbnails and all those attributes which are prominently displayed in the GUI). This would be very helpful - at least for me - to write an tool to export to MEF.
</p>
<p>4. What is the release plan of the ArcCatalog Plugin which writes the MEF zip file? And what schema/encoding will be used there? FGDC?</p>
<p>-- Stefan</p>