3.6 Design – Encoding and Schemas
3.6.1 In the same way that audio signals are encoded to a WAV file, which has a published specification, the element set will need to be encoded: XML, perhaps combined with RDF, is the recommendation stated above. This specification will be declared in the first line of any metadata instance <?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8” ?>. This by itself provides little intelligence: it is like telling the listener that the page of the CD booklet they are reading is made of paper and is to be held in a certain way. What comes next will provide intelligence (remember, to machines as well as people) about the predictable patterns and semantics of data to be encountered in the rest of the file. The rest of the metadata file header consists typically of a sequence of namespaces for other standards and schema (usually referred to as ‘extension schema’) invoked by the design.
<mets:mets xmlns:mets=“http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ ” xmlns:xsi=“http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance ” xmlns:dc=“http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ ” xmlns:xlink=“http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink/ ” xmlns:dcterms=“http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ ” xmlns:dcmitype=“http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype ” xmlns:tel=“http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/metadatahandbook/telterms.html ” xmlns:mods=“http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/ ” xmlns:cld=“http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/rslp/schema/ ” xmlns:blap=“http://labs.bl.uk/metadata/blap/terms.html ” xmlns:marcrel=“http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators.html ” xmlns:rdf=“http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type ” xmlns:blapsi=“http://sounds.bl.uk/blapsi.xml ” xmlns:namespace-prefix=“blapsi”>
Fig 2: Set of namespaces employed in the British Library METS profile for sound recordings
3.6.2 Such intelligent specifications, in XML, are called XML schema, the successor to DTD. DTDs are still commonly encountered on account of the relative ease of their compilation. The schema will reside in a file with the extension .xsd (XML Schema Definition) and will have its own namespace to which other operations and implementations can refer. Schemas require expertise to compile. Fortunately open source tools are available that enable a computer to infer a schema from a well-formed XML file. Tools are also available to convert xml into other formats, such as .pdf or .rtf (Word) documents into XML. The schema may also incorporate the idealised means for displaying the data as an XSLT file. Schema (and namespaces) for descriptive metadata will be covered in more detail in 3.9 Descriptive Metadata – Application Profiles, Dublin Core (DC) below.
3.6.3 To summarise the above relationships, an XML Schema or DTD describes an XML structure that marks up textual content in the format of an XML encoded file. The file (or instance) will contain one or more namespaces representing the extensionr schema that further qualify the XML structure to be deployed.
