Straw man

Thank you to all members of the working group who have replied (so far). I hope it was a good idea to have this semi-formal arrangement, rather than just releasing the documents into the wild. The concept is to permit some in-depth discussion within a smaller group than the CourseDataStage1 mailing list, thus hopefully saving time for those who aren't particularly interested in a lot of detail on the data definitions and vocabularies topics. It seems to be working so far.

Current issues include:

• How to handle special characters; UTF-8 encoding and character entities the suggested solution
• Images; do we want them? If so, what sizes and formats?
• Cost; is structure required for this element?
• Subjects and categories; a thorny problem, probably best addressed through the vocabulary work. My own preference would be to recommend that everyone uses the learndirect classification system (LDCS), then we'd get consistency - and we could map other things to it (JACS, SSA, sector specific lists) for those that don't want to use LDCS directly. However, others may have alternative views.
• Namespaces; I'd resisted mentioning this issue initially, but Craig's quite right to say that guidance would be a good idea, so we've made a start. How much more detail will we need? Time will tell.
• Reliable feed location stuff; again, I'm uncertain whether this really about data definitions (IMHO it's certainly not), but we have a doc that guidance about this issue could sit in.
• Identifiers and URIs; important discussion here about whether we really need to use URIs in XCRI-CAP identifiers - we have separate URL elements in any case, so maybe the requirement in the standard to use URIs should be lifted? More collective thought needed I feel.
• Target audience; I think this was perhaps an omission from XCRI-CAP 1.2. It's also being discussed in relation to the Learning Resources Metadata Initiative (LRMI), a much wider international initiative - see http://wiki.creativecommons.org/LRMI/Properties/Version_0.7 if you're interested.
• Multiple providers; some worms in that one too.