Many existing Digital Libraries, and websites in general, require input from users at various points and this is usually satisfied by providing a form for the user to fill in.
Digital Libraries in particular require users to input metadata for inclusion in some form of catalog. This is a very standard procedure yet is almost always hard-coded for every individual project. If there was a standard way to specify what the fields were and what the resulting data would look like, then maybe this form could be generated automatically. The existence of such a tool would greatly simplify the work of those who develop digital libraries and even other websites in general.
In May 2001, the World-Wide-Web Consortium released their final recommendation for the XML Schema language, which specifies the structure of an XML document. With a few additional pieces of information (for which there are hooks in the language), this specification could be used to generate XML metadata.
As an example, a typical entry in the XML Schema language could be:
<element name="identifier" type="string" minOccurs="1"/>
The interface should cater for any XML that is specificable by the Schema language, and should enforce some degree of type-checking based on what is in the Schema file. There are at least two different ways of implementing this: a Java applet or a set of web scripts (cgi, servlets, etc.). The resulting data could be displayed for demonstration purposes or routed into a metadata archive through a simple OAI-like interface (this will be provided).