rd format.
An LSID is a string with the following format: urn:lsid:<Authority>:<Namespace>:<ObjectID>[:<Version>]
Example LSIDs include:
TDWG has adopted LSIDs as its recommended standard for assigning globally unique identifiers to data records and has developed a range of software components to assist data providers and users in exchanging data via LSIDs. This software is listed on the TDWG wiki and includes:
Note that web browsers cannot directly resolve an LSID. When presenting an LSID for display to humans, it is recommended that the identifier should be prefixed with the address for the LSID Web Resolver web site, e.g. instead of showing urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:302735-2, show http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:302735-2.
Responses to requests for LSID metadata are expected to return this information encoded as RDF. The TDWG TaxonOccurrence, TaxonConcept and TaxonName vocabularies were in part developed to make it possible to use them in RDF documents. See the TDWG wiki page on LSID Vocabularies for more details.
For more information on LSIDs, see:
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has developed a simple protocol for harvesting of metadata from web repsitories. OAI-PMH is a set of six request types which allow clients to browse the contents of such a repository and, at a later date, to be able to discover more recent changes. These requests are:
Essentially OAI-PMH can be seen as a more sophisticated and flexible version of RSS. A data provider can advertise a set of resources via their metadata, and can optionally use Sets to subdivide these resources into categories of importance to users. Users can browse all metadata documents or the documents for a single Set and can limit requests to those metadata documents added, modified and even deleted since a specified date.
The ALA recommends the use of OAI-PMH particularly for repositories of images, documents, etc. It is highly suited to situations in which data records can be represented with plain Dublin Core and in which the contents of the repository change over time. The OAI-PMH service should itself be registered as a resource in the ALA metadata repository (along with any default metadata properties applying to all records). The ALA will then use this interface to harvest the underlying data records.
For more information on OAI-PMH, see:
In cases in which none of the above protocols is appropriate, it is possible simply to share a resource by publishing it in a web-browser-compatible format (word processor document, PDF, HTML, JPEG, MPEG, Flash, Java applet, etc.) and providing sufficient metadata to ensure that a user can understand the nature of the resource and how to use it.
In such cases, the ALA is able to direct users to the resource and may be able to add value by indexing the content of the resource (for text resources) but it will typically not be possible to use the information in more complex analyses.
The ALA is developing a metadata repository for capturing information about data resources of relevance to Australian biodiversity. This is a work-in-progress and the following guidelines will be extended and perhaps modified in coming months.
In general, metadata can solve several critical problems with managing data:
The goal of the ALA is to gather sufficient metadata from different sources to meet the following requirements:
Achieving this goal will depend on bringing together metadata gathered from different sources:
This section addresses only the first three of these sources, i.e. the metadata provided explicitly by the data provider.
Data providers should consider the range of expected users for their data and include appropriate metadata terms expected by those communities. For example, materials developed for use in education might consider the Metadata Guidelines provided by the Learning Federation and incorporate some of the suggested terms from the edna metadata standard. The ALA will seek to preserve and propagate such domain-specific metadata fields.
Dublin Core is a set of general-purpose metadata elements which can be used t