Development of the Exhibition Object Data Exchange Model (EODEM) reached an important milestone yesterday with the formal release of version 1.1 of the LIDO data-sharing standard. This is significant because EODEM is defined as a profile of LIDO – that is, an EODEM record comprises a fixed sub-set of LIDO data elements and values. And this in turn means that, if a collections management system vendor implements a LIDO 1.1 importer or exporter, they will have done the bulk of the work required to produce an EODEM importer or exporter.

In the meantime, we are continuing work on finalising the definition of EODEM in a form compatible with LIDO profiles. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is non-trivial, as it entails combining changes to the default LIDO XSD schema, a set of EODEM-specific Schematron rules, and human-readable documentation into a single XML file – and then writing a set of XSL stylesheets to convert these into machine-readable XSD and Schematron files, and human-readable documentation comprising:

• an outline of an EODEM file’s structure in HTML
• field-by-field documentation in HTML
• field-by-field documentation in PDF
• a sample EODEM LIDO 1.1. XML record

– and we’re working out how to do all this as we go.

As always, I’ll keep you posted on progress via this site. But for now, if you’re a collections management system developer and have plans to implement EODEM – you could do worse than starting work on a LIDO 1.1. exporter!