[AMF-talk] software descriptions in ReDIF

[Thomas Krichel]

  Kit Baum for the RePEc Team writes, regarding software
  descriptions in RePEc

> Can we rectify that by providing/drafting a metadata format?

  Of course... but this is really not top of priority for me, I will
  hope to get someone to do it some time. 

> After all I do not imagine there is any software description for
> statistical data sets either, but we have those included in the new
> system. All the advantages of being able to do OAI will be of
> limited value if we can only handle certain of the existing template
> types in an OAI repository.

  Sure. But I doubt that we should shoehorn software descriptions 
  into AMF. I have seen a software description proposal submitted 
  to the W3C by some guys from Microsoft in 1997. It was never
  adopted as a standard. 

> Christian was here Wed. for a seminar, and we had a chance to chat about 
> directions for various aspects of RePEc. One thing that we he suggests that 
> he will be able to deal with on his new hardware are book and chapter 
> templates, which will be useful.

  I happen to believe that the split, within ReDIF, into various
  text template types is a design mistake. It considerably complicates 
  the maintenance of the format and data encoded in the format 
  unnecessarily complicated. People do not care what type of the text
  is, they mostly care about some fundamental characterstics of the
  text such as authore and subject, and wether the fulltext is
  available online. 


  Cheers,

  Thomas Krichel                                   mailto:krichel@openlib.org
                                              http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                          RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel