Re: [sword-app-tech] [sword] Fwd: SWORD 1.3

[Jim D. <oj...@ca...>]

Hi Antony

2008/8/27 Antony Corfield [awc] <aw...@ab...>

>  6/ Pablo at MS requested a "preferred format" feature in the collection
> element of the service document, or alternatively a @preference attribute
> containing an ordinal number. Would others find this useful?
>
>
>
> Wouldn't this confuse things, surely a format should either be supported or
> not? How would a preference express it's self in real terms? Sounds like an
> MS obfuscation J
>

Hopefully Pablo is on this list and can fill in some gaps. I think the idea
was that you might have a good METS unpackager that e.g. understood full
metadata records, and a bagit unpackager that could unbundle the files, but
needed some human work afterwards to find the metadata files and help the
system with identification and conversion. You'd really rather people used
METS, but you could cope with bagit.

In specification terms, I'd imagine it would be something like the q
weightings in HTTP content negotiation; the server can advertise a weight
betwen 0 and 1 for each format (with an implicit default of if it's not
defined), and the client can use this information to decide what format to
use itself.

HTH,
jim