Makes my head hurt

I was talking with Diane this morning about building the schema portion of the NSDL Metadata Registry and I feel the need to write down some of what we discussed.

For purposes of discussion, we have a draft schema property interface that defines some basic metadata schema property properties. We started the conversation because I was trying to get away from the “property property” nomenclature and because I couldn’t quite figure out the best way to extend the too-simple model to incorporate repeatable, typed notes/annotations.

Over the course of the discussion we came to a few conclusions:

• What we’re really discussing is an Application Profile in the old DC sense of that term (it has since been changed to “Description Set Profile” to reflect the more DCAM-centric viewpoint of the current DC Community) in which we’re defining schema property restrictions, namespaces, and usage requirements: There can be only one token, definition, label, type and they’re required; ‘Type’ utilizes a controlled vocabulary containing the concepts ‘property’ and ‘subproperty’; etc.
• We have a Schema Properties Vocabulary registered that identifies these schema property description ‘terms’ as ‘concepts’, but this isn’t really correct because they’re actually properties of a metadata schema ‘property’ (and so we’re back to property properties <sigh>) and as such they should be registered as an Application Profile rather than a Vocabulary.
• The properties of each schema we register should be based on its own Application Profile, since there will be many different requirements and we’d like to provide some flexibility. For instance the RDA schema may need to have an additional property property that declares a relationship between the property and a FRBR entity.
• We can’t register a Metadata Schema Properties Application Profile until we can register a Schema
• In order to register a metadata schema we need a generic Metadata Schema Properties Application Profile
• We’re stuck with “property properties”
• This stuff makes my head hurt

In the interest of moving forward, stopping the spinning, and headache relief we’re going to pretend that a generic Metadata Schema Property Application Profile (MSPAP — pronounced ‘ems-pap’) exists and slap something together and make the interface fairly inflexibly tied to it. At some point in the future we’ll (hopefully) make it flexible enough to be based on any registered MSPAP.