RIF-CS 1.4 Changes (2012)

^{26 September 2012} 

Please be advised that the following proposals have been approved by the RIF-CS Advisory Board last 06 September 2012 and will be included in this year's RIF-CS schema change (scheduled for end of October). For more information, the minutes of the meeting are now available on the ANDS website.  More information will be made available through the ANDS Bulletin Board to the implementation date.  These changes are all backwards compatible:

Approved changes:

• Addition of 'metadata' type in relatedInfo to provide the ability to point to richer metadata formats used to describe the collection/party/service/activity.
• Addition of new dates element to describe any date associated with the life cycle of the data object.  The new 'dates' element will have date type vocabulary that supports Dublin Core
• Addition of 'hasPrincipalInvestigator' to Activity Relation Type vocabulary and 'isPrincipalInvestigatorOf' to Collection Relation Type vocabulary

The next RAB meeting is  scheduled on 03 October 2012 and the following changes will be discussed.

Proposed Changes: 

• Changes to the citation metadata to improve the format of a data citation, to cater for the citation requirements across disciplines and ensure closer alignment with other standards.
  • Impact to data providers: Optional requirement, as applicable.  Providers are encouraged to provide citation metadata.  With the proposed change, they will find individual citation elements much more flexible and easier to complete and eventually, data citation will contain enough information to cite and access data objects.
• Changes to spatial types vocabulary to remove unnecessary spatial type vocabulary.  Research Data Australia display will also be reviewed to support known types.
• Enhancement to relatedInfo type 'metadata' to allow recording of the metadata format.
• Removal of name part type 'initial' for party records.  This change allows compatibility with EAC-PCF and alignment with ANDS policy and best practice guidelines.

For any question or feedback, please email services@ands.org.au.

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^{31 August 2012}

We would like to provide a "heads up" about RIF-CS schema changes (approved and proposed) for 2012.  

The annual RIF-CS change happens in October/November each year, and shortly after that the ANDS Online Services interface and Research Data Australia are also updated to align with the RIF-CS schema changes. Changes are reviewed and approved by the RIF-CS Advisory Board, which is comprised of schema experts and stakeholders from the Australian research data commons community.

The following information may help you plan for any change or modification to your system or to your records.

Approved changes:

• Removal of 'UTC' from dateFormat vocabulary. UTC is actually a standard regulation of clock measurement, not a date encoding.
  • Impact to data providers: Feeds should be changed to reflect this revision (change 'UTC' to 'W3CDTF'). Any records containing the redundant vocabulary term should be updated to reflect this change. ANDS will not reject records using the incorrect term, but will instead treat them as user-defined vocabularies.
• Addition of licence types  to permit recording and display of licence types for collections.
  • Impact to data providers:  Optional requirement, adoption is voluntary but encouraged.  Note: Browse by Licence Type was introduced on Research Data Australia in Release 8.
• Addition of New description type vocabulary terms to support Contributor Home Pages
  • Impact to data providers:  None unless provider wish to take advantage of the new display template. Data providers wishing to create contributor pages will be required to use the new vocab types to correctly layout their descriptions, otherwise use of the new vocabularies will be optional.
  • Note: Contributor Home Pages were introduced in Release 8, and the "Manage my Records" screens of the ANDS Registry provide templates for manually creating contributor pages  

Proposed changes:

• Addition of 'metadata' type in relatedInfo to provide the ability to point to richer metadata formats used to describe the collection/party/service/activity.
  • Impact to data providers:  Optional requirement, as applicable.
• Addition of new dates element to describe any date associated with the life cycle of the data object.  The new 'dates' element will have date type vocabulary that supports Dublin Core.
  • Impact to data providers:  Optional requirement, as applicable.
• Addition of 'hasPrincipalInvestigator' to Activity Relation Type vocabulary and 'isPrincipalInvestigatorOf' to Collection Relation Type vocabulary
  • Impact to data providers:  Optional requirement, as applicable. 
• Citation: To align the schema with DataCite,  informal proposals have been received to change some elements of the citation metadata from mandatory to optional and to increase the number of optional elements. 

These proposals will be formalised in September.

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^{22 May 2012}

This is the current list of  proposed RIF-CS schema changes received from the community.  

Vocabulary changes:

• Additional Description Type vocabulary terms to support the development and display of Contributor Pages in Research Data Australia.
• Addition of relatedInfo type 'metadata' to provide the ability to point to richer metadata formats used to describe the collection/party/service/activity.
• Addition of licence type vocabulary  to permit recording and display of licence types for collections.

New element:

• Addition of new dates element to describe any date associated with the life cycle of the data object.  The new 'dates' element will have date type vocabulary that supports Dublin Core.

More details on these change proposals are on the RIF-CS Schema Changes Discussions forum on the ANDS Community Bulletin Board.  The first 2012 RIF-CS Advisory Board meeting will be held on May 29, 2012.

If you have an idea that is not in the list yet, we would like to hear from you!  Please contact  services@ands.org.au.