GRS-1 Metadata Elements

Issue raised by: Ronald van der Meer ronald@dis.nl Mon, 15 Sep 1997 11:51:34 +0200

What are the GRS-1 metadata elements elementDescriptor, surrogateFor and surrogateElement used for?

elementDescriptor was added during the latter part of the development of GRS-1 essentially as a place where an SGML dtd can be supplied, in the case where the element is an SGML document. It was given the more general name of elementDescriptor (rather than a more narrow name like sgmlDtd) with the notion that it could be put to some more general purpose in the future.

surrogateFor and surrogateElement are for use when a record contains a number of elements, say for illustration, the elements are objects, and one particular object is a surrogate (e.g. thumbnail) for another element within that record. Say for element A surrogateFor is supplied; it is supplied in the form of a tagPath, say a tagPath for element B. This means that element A is a surrogate for element B. Or say for element A, surrogateElement is supplied, in the form of a tagPath, where the tagPath is for element B. This means that element B is a surrogate for element A. (Note that the fact that both have to be in the same record -- both the element and its surrogate -- seems to limit the utility of these two.)