How to encode latitude and longitude in Dublin Core's dc.coverage? And in DSpace?

Dublin Core has a coverage term and a spatial term and a coverage element. Both coverages can refer to spatial or temporal elements, and can be specified however the user likes.

What is the proper way to encode a specific latitude and longitude in Dublin Core?

More specifically, in case this is different, DSpace uses Dublin Core, and includes dc.coverage.spatial in its metadata fields. If I put a geolocated item in DSpace, and I know its latitude and longitude, how should I put that in dc.coverage.spatial?

wdenton

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Comments

Answer by dsalo

Cynically: however you want; nothing will be able to use it.

Less cynically: Dublin Core has written up a "DCMI Point specification" that should do what you want.

Comments

• Joe: damn them and their geo-centric spatial coordinate system! it's completely useless for anything not on earth or in a geostationary orbit. (although, it does solve the lat/long question)
• dsalo: You could always suggest an extension! ;)
• Joe: it's a massive can of worms .. I just e-mailed something to the DataCite folks as they had a proposal to support "spatial" (again, they meant geo). But you have RA/Dec for basic astronomy, but to explain it all, you need WCS. Just as an example in solar, we have lat/long, but that's from earth ... the sun rotates so there's carrington lat/long for sun spots, plus polar coordinates for CMEs ... but the telescope pointing is in x/y projections.
• Joe: Oh ... and my suggestion to DataCite was for them to pack it all into Subject, with an identifier for the coordinate system used in subjectScheme. (and do the same for the temporal & spectral descriptions, which can also be pretty complex, as you try to explain things recording as they're moving, with red shift, etc.)
• Trevor Owens: Alternatively, the simple GEORSS specs make a lot of sense too :) http://www.georss.org/simple