[eml-dev] LTER IMC use of the project schema, and temporalCoverage (bug 1974)

[Margaret O'Brien]

Hi all -
The LTER IM committee is working on a database to store descriptive 
information about research projects, and we have based the schema on the 
eml-project module. One of the first adaptations was to include the 
resource-group in project. As you might expect, a discussion has arisen 
on how to describe a project which is planned to continue indefinitely 
when the temporalCoverage tree requires that an endDate be supplied.

A suggestion has come up that we adapt the temporalCoverage model to 
include a third choice, an element name="ongoing" which has only one 
date, a startDate. So an instance doc would have one of the following as 
a child of <temporalCoverage>:
<singleDateTime> (existing, one to many)
or
<rangeOfDates> (existing, with beginDate and endDate required)
or
<ongoing> (NEW, with only a beginDate required)

An image of the schema for this modification of TemporalCoverageType is 
attached. This construct allows the nature of the resource to be 
encoded, and is flexible since instance documents can be translated (if 
necessary) to EML2 by transforming the ongoing/beginDate to 
rangeOfDates/beginDate and adding a rangeOfDates/endDate that contains 
the current year.

This suggestion is not among those listed under the bug 
(http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1794) although 
something similar might appear if a new data type were introduced for 
dataset (comment #4). What are your thoughts on such a modification? Has 
anyone thought further about this need in datasets? It is important that 
our use of this schema remains compatible with EML.

Thanks -
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
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