Hello? What were the designers of ISO19139 thinking? Were any of them, in fact, thinking?
Consider this, my fellow sufferers:
gmd:identificationInfo/gmd:MD_DataIdentification/gmd:pointOfContact/gmd:CI_ResponsibleParty/gmd:contactInfo/gmd:CI_Contact/gmd:address/gmd:CI_Address/gmd:electronicMailAddress/gco:CharacterString
This is the hoop-jumping necessary to extricate the email address of a contact person for a data set, from a piece of ISO19139 XML. That’s 10, count ‘em, 10 XML element levels deep.
This is metadata madness!
- Why are so many elements repeated, with a short name then a long one?
- Why is every text string wrapped in a
gco:CharacterStringelement – just in case an XML parser doesn’t realise that it’s looking at text?
I suspect there’s a tyranny of the toolset at work, an expectation that everyone’s working with W3C XML Schema and not with a more relaxed schema language or, imagine, none at all.
19139 is simply grotesque. It makes a joke of the word “standard”. The INSPIRE expert group on Metadata skirted round the issue, but it’s not being recommended for use in European projects – the dog’s not barking, though ISO may be.
I wouldn’t care, except that it is starting to affect me now. Organisations buy a proprietary toolkit, read some dodgy abstract reference documents which say that 19115 is The Standard Way To Do Geo-Metadata and 19139 is The Standard Way To Put It In XML. Then some poor muggins has to write code to actually re-use the information.
I am replacing an old, minimal elementtree based 19139 parser with an XSLT stylesheet which transforms the data into RDF/XML. The verbosity of XSLT and of 19139 complement each other beautifully, leading to a baroque intertwining which would make great net.art wallpaper but is hopeless for information management purposes.
I am not even going near the topic of model overdesign issues with ISO19115 itself because people with influence and vested interest quite sensibly do not care.
