To the TDWG mailing list and whomever it may concern,

Darwin Core uses a Dublin Core element, dcterms:location, in its definition of classes and elements. However, no current XSD files for Dublin Core (that I can find) define location as an element. For reference, the current Dublin Core XSD files that I am familiar with are available at http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/qdc/ Given that dcterms:location is therefore an undefined element, the Darwin Core XML is invalid.

This is important to me, and my employer MERIDIAN, because we are implementing Darwin Core in a GeoNetwork metadata schema plugin for our repository. To allow other documents to be validated against our schema within GeoNetwork, the entire plugin XML (which for us includes the Darwin Core XML) must be valid. I previously sent an email about this in September but did not receive any useful advice at the time. Development on our metadata repository has progressed without this element since then, as we have been tracking down other errors in GeoNetwork, but this is the current 'blocking' problem for us.

The Darwin Core XSD files reference a dublin_core.xsd in their comments, which is said to contain dcterms:location. My best guess at what this refers to is https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/blob/2011-10-26/xsd/dublin_core.xsd - which is from a previous version of Darwin Core, and appears to be a custom version of http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/qdc/2008/02/11/dcterms.xsd - so it unclear whether this is correct or not.

Given that TDWG is responsible for Darwin Core, I am hopeful that someone will have a tip or solution. My alternative is to define dcterms:location myself as a custom insertion into Dublin Core, but based on the comments in Darwin Core files I believe some suitable XSD must exist.

Thank you very much for your time,

Kim Mortimer

[MERIDIAN on blue circle containing many numbers, with an orange wave pulse to the right.] Kim Mortimer Data Manager MERIDIAN - Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network Institute for Big Data Analytics, Faculty of Computer Sciences, Dalhousie University p: + 1 902 494 1812 m: +1 902 880 1863 a: 6050 University Ave, Halifax, NS, B3H 4R2, Canada w: https://meridian.cs.dal.ca e: k.mortimer@dal.camailto:k.mortimer@dal.ca