TS 16371

CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, has released a set of Guidelines for Implementors of EN 15744 and EN 15907 for sale through its national member bodies. CEN/TS 16371:2012 intends to provide guidance for implementors designing data exchange formats for EN 15744 and/or EN 15907-based metadata.

According to CEN regulations, a Technical Specification (TS) is to be reviewed every 3 years at the latest. This initial TS, entitled Guidelines for implementors of EN 15744 and EN 15907, addresses the following issues:

• Encoding of EN 15744-based metadata. Since this standard is closely modelled after the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES, ISO 15836), any encoding endorsed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative for use with the DCMES will also be accepted as a valid encoding for EN 15744.

• Encoding of EN 15907-based metadata in XML. This section gives a set of design rules to be observed when developing an XML-based exchange specification for EN 15907. It does not specify an "official" XML schema as such. The design rules cover several issues such as ways of expressing relationships, and an application-specific schema layer that separates data elements defined in EN 15907 from their specialisations which can (and should) be enriched with controlled vocabularies or other restrictions.

A draft version of the CEN Technical Specification can be downloaded here.