Intern:Keyword

Following is an instruction for the usage of technical keywords (16.11.2004). 1) Technical keywords should be used to produce non-ambiguous selections of records. E.g. you must define a technical keyword “@IMAGES” for the project “IMAGES”, because the scope of the term “images” is ambiguous and therefore it is likely that you will not get an exclusive selection of records for that project.

2) characters to be used are: {A-Z,a-z,0-9} (not allowed are {-,_, ,} all special characters and umlauts etc.)

3) The first character is @.

4) The first character after the @ character must not be a cipher.

5) Do not define keywords having only meaningless or general terms that could be used also for another context.

6) Put the general terms in front, followed by more specialized terms.

7) Inner capitels (Binnenkapitele) could be used for better readability of composites.

Examples: @JGOFS, @JGOFSAustralia, @SummerSchoolBremen2003, @Zhao2004

In the system are now 129 technical keywords, 68 of them have to be changed, some of them seem to be obsolete. Just for you to understand the procedure:

Step 1: Any not allowed characters are eleminated (by myself for keyword those remaining).

Step 2: Any corresponding ddi’s must be adjusted. Hannes and Rainer will send around a list with keywords naming also those who could be responsible for the adjustment of ddi’s.

Step 3: Descriptions of all data sets related to changed keywords have to be renewed. This takes around 24 hours. So, it might take a while for the ddi’s to work properly again. We will start the procedure this afternoon.

Some more remarks on technical keywords (16.11.2004):

1) all queries including those for technical keywords are not case sensitive. So, using capital letter, inner capitels etc. is only for our internal work with these keywords. But technical keywords are case sensitive once defined, so please do not define a tecnical keyword again with another spelling!!!!! This is important for "Sets" on OAI and the Portals.

2) The “@Ref…” keywords are reserved for usage by the PANGAEA system. It is an implicite mechanism that links references and data sets through these keywords. You need not take care of that. There are more of them like @EventXXX, @ProjectXXX, @AuthorXXX, @PiXXX and are (a) not visible (b) for internal use only.