[eml-dev] EML 2.1.0

[Margaret O'Brien]

Hi eml-dev
Thank you all for your input to the very long discussions Tuesday. We 
now have a list of issues to clean up for EML2.1.0, and have identified 
items needing attention in the future, and even recruited volunteers to 
start work on them. I have added volunteers names to the comment with 
the discussion summary (dated 9/30 or 10/1), and reassigned bugs. The 
new bugs were entered for the general issues identified Tuesday, and 
these were all targeted "Postpone".

There are a few 2.1.0 bugs that have small unresolved questions which 
need input so they can be closed or re-targeted. They are all straight 
forward, but need approval by a larger group. We should be able to 
accomplish this with your additional comments to bugzilla or to this email.

1. http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3480
How important is it for the distribution elements in the two 
distribution Types (res:DistributionType  and 
phys:PhysicalDistributionType) to have function attributes with default 
content reflecting its generally intended use? that is, should we try to 
encode different defaults for the two types? An author can change 
defaults as necessary:
res:DistributionType has default <distribution funtion="information" ...>
and
phys:PhysicalDistributionType has default <distribution 
funtion="download" ...>
Encoding these defaults in the schema requires that a 3rd type be 
defined which these 2 types are then derived from.

2. http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1662
Matt volunteered to review and comment on bug 1662, which deals with the 
fact that node ids in EML could be better used (and reflect reality) if 
the pair "id" and "system" was required to be unique in a document, 
rather than just the id. Recall that this bug was originally targeted 
for 2.1, but its larger impact will be on the EML parser.
 
3. http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2512
One other housekeeping bug fell off the list. This one formalizes the 
need for alphanumeric content in elements rather than just whitespace as 
is currently allowed.

The target date for EML2.1.0 release candidate 4 is next Friday, Oct 10. 
mark your calendars!
thanks again -
Margaret

-- 


========================
Margaret O'Brien
Information Management
Santa Barbara Coastal LTER 
Marine Science Institute
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA  93106-6150

805-893-2071
mob at icess.ucsb.edu
http://sbc.lternet.edu
========================