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Freestanding OLAC Metadata |
The main focus of OLAC is on developing repositories of metadata records that document the language resource holdings of institutions. However, the OLAC metadata standard may also be used by individual researchers to create a freestanding XML document that describes a particular language resource they have developed. Such a freestanding metadata document may be archived with the resource; it may also be formatted for display and posted on the web. This page describes how to create freestanding metadata documents and provides a service for validating and formatting them.
A freestanding OLAC metadata document is an XML document that has a root element of <olac:olac> and conforms to the XML schema for OLAC metadata. For instance,
A freestanding metadata document can be created with a simple text editor (like Notepad). You could, for instance, make a copy of the sample metadata document above and edit it to match the information needed for your resource. Consult the OLAC metadata standard and the OLAC Metadata Usage Guidelines for details on the metadata elements and encoding schemes that may be used. Once you have a draft metadata document, submit it to the validation service below to ensure that it is valid.
If you have an XML editor, you may use it with the XML Schema or the XML DTD for OLAC metadata. Note that the XML Schema is the authoritative definition of the OLAC standard. The DTD defines all the elements and attributes that are possible in an OLAC metadata document, but it does not embody all the value constraints. Use the validation service below to perform a final check of validity.
The form below offers a service for validating and formatting freestanding OLAC metadata. Paste your XML document into the text area below, and click the "Format" button. First your submission is validated against the XML schema for OLAC metadata by the Xerces-J parser. If validation errors are found, a page reporting the errors is returned. If there are no errors, the process invokes the second step of generating an HTML page that displays the metadata in a human readable form. The generated form by the "Format" button conforms to the OLAC Display Format. Simply use the Save As function of your web browser to save the resulting page so that you can post it on your own web site. Alternatively, you can download the XSLT stylesheet and modify it for use on your site.
Click the "Analyze" button to perform an analysis of metadata quality for the record entered into the form. The result displays the metadata quality score for the record (as defined in OLAC Metadata Metrics) along with recommendations on changes that would improve the quality score.