Thanks for your comments!
See below:
On Nov 30, 2006, at 4:13 PM, Bruce Westcott wrote:
Thank you Jeroen,
Though I did not perform more than a cursory eyeball parse on the DTDs, they
certainly did appear to me to be the "legacy" DTDs which have been
accessible at http://www.esri.com/metadata/ since Arc 8.0. As you may know,
these reflect the work done in early drafts of ISO-19115; I believe DTDs
survived in that document up through the 19115CD version, but then were
eliminated in anticipation of moving to the use of schema.
Yes, ESRI also relied on the pre-release version of ISO for a long time.
The attached white paper is part of the Arc9.2 release, and says regarding
ISO-19139: "ESRI implements this specification in the GIS Portal Toolkit 3.1
and ArcIMS Metadata Server-9.2." I have also attached some selected pages
from their "What's New in 9.2" paper. I don't have the software, so don't
yet know how their implementation has changed.
I though they did upgrade by now
I think GeoNetwork is paying the price of attempting to implement ISO-19115
in its early stage. That is, now both the ESRI DTDs and the ISO-19115DIS
version are obsolete, and you're working to move up to more current
specifications. We can all work with the ISO-19139 schema, but I'm not
certain those have actually been adopted (finally) yet, and I believe they
will continue to evolve.
Not so sure. We have sticked to that version for a long time and upgrade now in version 2.1
For that we have indeed created a migration XSL that converts 19115 compliant to the DTD to 19139 compliant to the schemas. It is used by the migration application to upgrade from version 2 to 2.1. By purposely not upgrading for a long time, we have an easier procedure for upgrading. 
Version 2.1 uses 19139 structured ISO19115 metadata and for the time being also 19115 natively. 2.1 is currently only in alpha, but functional for a large part on the server part. The GIU is undergoing upgrade at this moment to support editing of 19139 metadata.
Ciao,
Jeroen
As you know, I consult with Intergraph on its Catalog products, and we have
addressed these transitional issues differently. For some time now,
GeoMedia has supported export of ISO-19139PDTS files, and we are just now
implementing an update to the XSLT, so as to produce ISO.XML files that
conform to the current published version of the 19139 schema.Bruce Westcott
Geospatial Metadata Consultant
Marshfield, Vermont 05658 -- USA
802.426.3344-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Ticheler [mailto:Jeroen.Ticheler@anonymised.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 8:44 AM
To: Bruce Westcott
Cc: Nicolas Ribot
Subject: Re: ESRI-2-ISO transformationHi Bruce,
The DTD's come from ESRI (for the ArcCatalog metadata validation) and
from the ISO19115 DIS document. They are rather old. We developed at
the time XSLs to clean the ArcCatalog metadata so they could directly
go into GeoNetwork and vice-versa. Since we use(d) 19115DIS as format
that still works. No attempt has been made yet to upgrade them for
19139. Also, ArcCatalog as we know it does not work with 19139 yet
(maybe 9.2 does now, I don't know!?).
We actually have an improved version to convert from GeoNetwork to
ArcCatalog that I asked Patrizia to post to the community. the same
updates have not yet been applied the other way around.
Hope that helps, ciao,
JeroenOn Nov 28, 2006, at 5:33 PM, Nicolas Ribot wrote:
Nicolas,
I see from the internal comments that Aleta (ESRI) and Jeroen
(FAO) are
authors of the two DTD files. Can you tell me:
1) Have additional edits been made that are not documented?
2) None of these files seem to make reference to the ISO-19139 schema
published at eden | Équipe D'Experts en Normalisation . For that reason I
understand
that these files may be greatly useful in migrating ESRI_ISO.XML
into an
ISO.XML format that can be ingested by GeoNetwork. But usefulness
in other
workflows is limited, is it not?
3) Can you provide any background information on who developed the
XSL
files, when and for what purpose? I assume that it is your work,
expressly
done to support migration of ESRI_ISO.XML into GeoNetwork, but I
thought I
should confirm that.Hello Bruce
Unfortunately, I will not be able to help you much concerning these
questions:
I'm not at all a DTD/XML specialist and I juste used the XSL file I
sent
to convert existing ESRI XML documents into GN XML files.I think Jeroen will be much more skilled to answer you.
Regards
Nicolas<Supported OGC_ISO Standards.pdf>
<Metadata_news_ArcGIS_92.pdf>