addition of an importance attribute

[dietuyt]

Summary: introduce an "importance" attribute for all CMD_Elements, indicating if filling in a field is mandatory, recommended, optional or deprecated. To be used by editors to guide the user when entering CMDI metadata descriptions.

Should probably be implemented as an 'extended display information cue', see CMDI 1.2/Cues/Display information.

Details:

-->If something is mandatory, an editor should check if a data category
actually was filled in and prompt the user to fill it in before saving
(Attn: there may be valid reasons for overriding this, creating an
invalid file; mandatory relates also to a cardinality of 1..n of content
categories)

-->If something is recommended, an editor should prompt the user for
this data category before saving (overriding possible, this is for
categories such as title, author, etc. but where for principle reasons
the cardinality also allows it to be optional)

-->If something is optional, it is optional (right, tautology)

-->If something is deprecated, an editor should not display the data
category at all, but if it is inserted, should not complain about it
(this is for data categories inserted for historic reasons for example
for legacy data integration).

We also believe that this attribute would be useful for a display
function such as the document viewer of our faceted browser:

-->Data categories that are mandataory and recommended should always be
displayed (for example a user should see the copyright field, even if
there is no content, to inform him that the copyright information is not
included in the metadata file);

-->Optional data categories should only be displayed if there is some
content attached to it (for example if somebody fills in the continent,
the continent is displayed, otherwise ignored because the information
may not be relevant)

-->Deprecated data categories should not be displayed at all, but of
course kept in the original XML.

[dietuyt]

For CMDI version 1.2

[twagoo]

Adding this to the CMDI 1.2 milestone, though it would be compatible with CMDI 1.1 as it has no consequences for the instances.

[twagoo]

Can be implemented as an 'extended display information cue', see CMDI 1.2/Cues/Display information

[Twan Goosen]

Fixed as part of CMDI 1.2 (See CMDI 1.2/Specification)