Thursday 6 September 2007

Metadata Planning

After a couple of weeks' holiday, I've been spending some time developing some programs to help visualise the metadata that is used by a repository. There are two requirements -one is just to see all the fields that users are being asked to enter for the various kinds of deposits. That is useful for planning a repository, or just keeping an eye on the usefulness of what you planned some years ago. For example, our repository has a "comments" field that is supposed to be used to provide feedback on any problems that were encountered depositing each article. I don't think that it has ever been used!

The second requirement is to see an overview of the process that depositors have to walk through. Because EPrints allows the deposit workflow to be customised according to the attributes of the deposited item or the attributes of the depositing user then understanding the interplay between the various conditions can be quite taxing! Especially when the official workflow document is expressed in XML.

You can see an the first (tabular) listing at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/ecs.html and an extract of the second (diagram) at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/ecs.png

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