Beacause the granularity of the existing CMDI files and collections varies a lot (from 1 CMDI = 1 large corpus to 1 CMDI file = single small textfile) it would be handy to indicate that certain CMDI descriptions are about a collection as a whole (e.g. the Corpus Spoken Dutch).

There are several possibilities to cope with this:

• An extra Header element could be introduced, say <MdCollectionCoverage>collection</MdCollectionCoverage>
  • pro: easy to interprete/understand
• Use the ResourceProxy? hierarchy or the optional IsPartOfList? element
  • con: needs a lot of processing, not so robust
• The collection profile could be taken as a/the indication something is a collection:
  • con: this could create too many collections to be usable (when used with deeply nested collections)
• Only those collections using a specific collection component could be marked as being a collection.
  • con: idem as above