Component Editor

The Component Editor should be usable not only by metadata experts, but also by users that need advice on the best way to describe their particular resources. The Component Editor is able to interact with the Component Registry that will offer an adequate view or views on the available components and exchange component specifications with it. The Component Editor can download an XML-Schema of a CLARIN metadata profile for use with tools that cannot directly interact with the CLARIN Component Registry.

The Component Editor should support:

• Interaction with the Component Registry such that the user can use its particular views to select components for processing in the editor.
• Creation of a new metadata component as a flat list of metadata elements. The metadata element is a name/value pair whereof he value can be of a specific type and adheres to a scheme that is also documented in the schema. Metadata element value constraints can be dependent on the value of other metadata attribute. The choice of a value from a Controlled Vocabulary (CV) for one metadata attribute leads to a different CV for the dependent attribute. In other words the CVs can be coupled. To not complicate matters we assume that this dependency can only take place between attributes in a single list component. An element or list can also be an existing metadata component from the registry. For semantic interoperability every element and component must have a reference to a concept registry. See Metadata Component for a UML diagram of a metadata component. Every aggregated metadata element and component should have an attribute specifying its cardinality in the metadata description: 0-1, 1, 0.., 1..
• Modification of an existing component by adding new metadata element(s) or deleting elements or components, creating a new component. Initially there will be no versioning of components so every modified component is a new one.
• Combination of two or more components creating a new component.

All newly created components are independent from the constituent components they where created from i.e. a new autonomous data structure and accompanying XML schema is created. So inheritance is implemented by copying.

Every metadata element specification in the component schema must have a reference to a concept registry.