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^{18 November 2011}

What's new in RIF-CS v1.3.0

Background
The Registry Interchange Format - Collections and Services (RIF-CS) was developed as an interchange format for supporting the submission of collections metadata to a collections registry. In order to be fit-for-purpose the Schema is updated annually. Version 1.3.0 was released on 18/11/2011 and harvests using the new version can be accepted from 7/12/2011. Following, is a quick overview of what has changed in RIF-CS.

Changes in RIF-CS v1.3.0
All the schema changes are backwards compatible, and no existing feeds are required to change. The new version will however allow research organisations to encode structured information about:

licences
access rights
the publisher of the data
birth and death dates for people
start and finish dates for organisations or projects
new controlled vocabulary for re-use and data quality information

Updates to Research Data Australia will take advantage of this structured information over the next few months.

New elements
1. Rights: There is a new <rights> element for a collection, activity, party or service. This element should contain at least one of 3 types:

<rightsStatement> text or uri relating to intellectual property rights <licence> text, type, or uri relating to official permissions <accessRights> text, type, or uri relating to access rights and constraints based on privacy, security, or other policies

Note. Previously, rights and access rights were described using types embedded within the <description> element. New contributors are encouraged to use the new <rights> element to allow prospective users of the data search and browse using rights information.

2. Existence dates: There is a new <existenceDates> element for a party, activity or service. This may contain one or more of 2 sub-elements:

<startDate> use required ‘dateFormat' attribute to specify format
<endDate> use required ‘dateFormat' attribute to specify format

3. Publisher: There is a new <publisher> element within the <citationInfo> element for a collection.

The schema documentation is available at: http://ands.org.au/resource/rif-cs.html

More guidelines and examples will become available in the Content Providers Guide over the next few weeks.

^{02 August 2011}

Ther RIF-CS Advisory Board (RAB) members held its first RIF-CS Advisory Board meeting on 26 July 2011. The members discussed the proposed changes; and the impact, benefits and technical options available. Agreed changes will be bundled into the annual RIF-CS changes due for Q3 2011.
Other proposals that needed revision or those that were not presented due to time limitation will be discussed in the next meeting scheduled in the next couple of weeks.

Updates on the proposals will be posted on the ANDS Community Bulletin Board.

More information: RAB Minutes of the Meetings

Comments on the proposals can be directly posted on the ANDS Community Bulletin Board or sent to services@ands.org.au.

^{16 June 2011}

This is the current list of proposed RIF-CS schema changes received from the community. These are scheduled for discussion and consideration in the RIF-CS Advisory Board meeting in July.

Removal of type 'event' from the suggested vocabulary for class 'activity'
Ability to select multiple collection types for a 'collection'
Clarification of the semantics for collection types 'collection' and 'dataset' (no expected schema change)
Removal of address wrapper elements to simplify the 'location' element
Addition of new components to citationInfo to comply with DataCite minimum metadata requirements - as a result of DOI project
Transformation of identifiers such as handles, DOIs or purls to resolvable URLs on ingest.
Addition of name parts for parties of type 'group' Addition of a new party type of 'role' (e.g. Data Custodian, Data Manager, etc.)
Addition of 'relatedInfo' types 're-use metadata' and 'data quality metadata'
Addition of new 'rights' element to record Creative Commons licenses and other rights information.

We will provide more details on these change proposals on the RIF-CS Schema Changes Discussions forum on the ANDS Community Bulletin Board in a week or two. You will be able to give feedback or comments leading up to the meeting.

If you have an idea that is not in the list yet, we would like to hear from you! Please contact services@ands.org.au at your earliest convenience and latest by 24 June 2011.

^{6 August 2010}

In November 2010, minor enhancements were made to RIF-CS Schema v1.0.1.

The updated RIF-CS v1.2.0

expands the amount of information that can be recorded about a related information resource such as a publication;
introduces a new element for describing how a dataset should be cited;
moves the description of spatial and temporal coverage of collections to a new coverage element; and
simplifies the recording of contact telephone and fax numbers.

The changes are a response to the experiences of early contributors to the Australian Research Data Commons during 2009, and have been designed to minimise the workload impact on data providers. An extended changeover period (until June 2011) will apply for harvested metadata. More information...