[Medin_dacwg] warning of incorrectly structured URLs in MEDIN metadata

[Gaffney, Sean P.]

Dear DAC Working Group members,

Apologies if you are receiving information that you are already aware of, but I would like to highlight an issue that the MEIDN Standards Working Group discussed at our last meeting.

In this meeting, I informed the Standards group of an issue I had found where MEDIN XML which was based on http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/documents/Metadata/INSPIRE_MD_IR_and_ISO_v1_2_20100616.pdf has incorrect URLs for ISO codelists.

In this issue, any URLs which link to ISO codelists following the structure in the example

<gmd:MD_ScopeCode
codeList="http://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ISO_19139_Schemas/resou
rces/Codelist/gmxCodelists.xml#MD_ScopeCode" codeListValue="dataset">

will not resolve.

This is because the section of the snippet '.../resources/Codelist/...' should actually have 'codelist' with a lower case 'c' e.g '.../resources/codelist/...'

This was addressed by INSPIRE with an addendum in document http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/documents/Metadata/MD_IR_and_ISO_20131029.pdf

Can I please therefore ask all the DACs to check whether their MEDIN XML metadata are constructed using the guidance from the 2010 INSPIRE document or whether you are using the more up to date 2013 guidance? If you have created metadata using the online tool, your metadata are correct. Unfortunately, up to now, if you have used Metadata Maestro, your metadata will have the incorrect structure URLs.

The implication of this is subtle but important. Irrespective of the capitalisation, the XML will pass the validator as the URLs are structurally valid, and they will still be usable if manually read, but if stakeholders have systems to read the XML using machine-to-machine technologies, they will not resolve the ISO lists, and therefore our metadata will not be fully useful to them.

Many thanks,

Sean



        Dr Sean Gaffney
        Manager, MEDIN Standards and Guidelines Work Stream
        Joseph Proudman Building, 6 Brownlow Street Liverpool L3 5DA
        w: www.oceannet.org<http://www.oceannet.org/>; e: sgaf at bodc.ac.uk<mailto:sgaf at bodc.ac.uk>; t: +44 (0) 151 795 4950



  ________________________________
This message (and any attachments) is for the recipient only. NERC is subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the contents of this email and any reply you make may be disclosed by NERC unless it is exempt from release under the Act. Any material supplied to NERC may be stored in an electronic records management system.
  ________________________________
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk/pipermail/medin_dacwg/attachments/20161028/c019c533/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Picture (Device Independent Bitmap) 1.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 6650 bytes
Desc: Picture (Device Independent Bitmap) 1.jpg
Url : http://mailman.nerc-liv.ac.uk/pipermail/medin_dacwg/attachments/20161028/c019c533/attachment.jpg