The PBCore v1.1 XML Schema Definition (XSD) is published! For a complete discussion on what this means for the advancement of PBCore and facilitating our Community of Practice, see http://pbcore.org/PBCore/PBCoreXMLSchema.html.
Since the initial publication (April 2005) of the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary (PBCore), many stations, organizations and information systems have begun to use its 53 elements to describe the intellectual content, property rights, and instantiations/formats of their media items.
At the same time, the PBCore project has been perfecting its XML Schema Definition (XSD) (for a discussion of XSD see the PBCore XML Schema web page. This XSD is the main framework upon which all the PBCore elements, their relationships, vocabulary picklists, and data types are organized and defined. The purpose of building an accurate and meticulous XSD is to ensure that when PBCore compliant metadata descriptions are shared between data systems, the contributing system and the receiving system are both able to “machine read” and faultlessly interpret and display the descriptions.
During the exacting process of creating the PBCore XSD, we determined that some enhancements to the underlying structure of PBCore were necessary. For the most part, these enhancements are related to binding together related metadata elements (such as Title and TitleType) into new containers that are designated as “parent” elements. In a hierarchical arrangement, each parent element will collect and house associated “child” or sub-elements. Basically, what was a “flat” arrangement of the 53 PBCore elements is becoming a more structured “hierarchical” arrangement (for a discussion of hierarchical arrangements, see the Hierarchical vs Flat Elements Relationships web page.
The underlying meaning and attributes of the PBCore elements are not changing. However, their inter-dependencies and structural arrangements are. We realize these alterations may impact current adopters of the PBCore Metadata Dictionary, and we invite your comments and concerns. As well, the PBCore website has published a complete description of the changes between version 1.0 and 1.1 (see PBCore Elements Viewed by Changes).
We feel the improvements to PBCore will greatly enhance its usability by Public Broadcasting communities and certainly improve the precision involved in sharing metadata between various information systems.
