Data Type Registry First Prototype

Dear Gridhar --
I am new to RDA, so please forgive me if I am asking basic questions. I am
starting to track RDA activities more closely, and found your email about
an RDA Data Type Registry to be helpful. Thank you. In reading about your
work, I didn't find an evaluation of existing services that might already
perform something akin to the functions that you are seeking. Is there
such a comparison? In particular, three other groups have similar services
that I know of, all of which might be relevant to your effort. They are:
1) DataONE Object Format Registry (https://cn.dataone.org/cn/v1/formats)
-- A shared object type list that is more fine grained than MIME types,
with a simple REST API; used by members of the DataONE federation of
repositories, which includes repositories in North America, Europe, Asia,
Africa, and South America.
-- This list is the simplest of the three, but easy to implement and
extremely useful for repositories to share an understanding of data formats
2) Universal Data Format Registry (UDFR; http://udfr.org)
-- A knowledge base of file format representation information for use
by the digital preservation community, developed by CDL; this collection is
built as an OWL ontology of formats and has more detailed information about
formats and semantically related content, but has yet to gain widespread
usage; it is a very complete model of format information
3) PRONOM format registry (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/)
-- A technical registry about file formats, software products and other
technical components required to support long-term access to electronic
records; PRONOM is used in the archival and library communities, and has a
relationship with UDFR.
Do you plan to interact with these existing services? Will your service be
significantly different in scope from those?
Thanks,
Matt
--
Matthew B. Jones
Director of Informatics Research and Development
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California Santa Barbara

Hi Giridhar –
I had a go and added an entry. Yes, choosing appropriate key-value parameters was a challenge. I ended up with an entry that was strangely unsatisfying ...
Then I tried to add an entry for a type that specializes the first one. Need some guidance here!
Simon
- Show quoted text -From: gmanepalli=***@***.***-groups.org [mailto:***@***.***-groups.org] On Behalf Of gmanepalli
Sent: Friday, 28 February 2014 9:04 PM
To: Data Type Registries WG
Subject: [rda-dtr-wg] Data Type Registry First Prototype
Hi,
Here's a link to the first instance of the Data Type Registry: http://typeregistry.org/registrar/. An example of a type record is here: http://hdl.handle.net/11314.2/ceac7eae757dc20370f65c9222cb1784
The documentation menu has links to the REST API document and the Q&A document I forwarded a few weeks ago. A few items to note:
- This version of the Type Registry issues identifiers to type records during registration. Those identifiers are Handles. Future versions of the Registry will allow users to specify their own identifiers for type records.
- The data model supported by the Registry is what was discussed in the Q&A document. One of the fields is what I called as a key-value pair, where users may specify their own key and associate a value for that. For example, if someone wants to specify an OWL description in the type record, then the key could be "OWL" and the value could be a URL to the OWL description. It is obvious that we need to ensure the "keys" in the key-value pairs are consistent across users. Future versions of the Registry will enable such consistency.
- There are a few UI issues that we noted including the lack of clickable links at appropriate places. We will fix those in the future versions.
- All records in this instance are meant to demonstrate the expected use (versus being operational records). I encourage everyone to submit records in the form that you believe is pertinent. A wide spectrum of use will inform the data model.
Try out and notify us your comments - preferably before the Third Plenary. (Sad to say I won't make it to the plenary. I will probably be available on Skype during the working group session).
Giridhar
--
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