Frequently Asked Questions - Metadata: Arbil as CMDI editor

Arbil is indeed a metadata editor with support for CMDI files.

It used to be an editor for IMDI only, the CMDI functionality has been added later on (since the beginning of 2010). This means that the support for CMDI files was not as extensive as the one for IMDI. However, since release 2.3 of Arbil the support for CMDI has been significantly improved.

We recommend to use at least version 2.3.

At the time of writing (2012-01-05) this is the "testing" version.

From http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/arbil/arbilversions/

• Download Arbil (2.3 or higher) and start it
• Go to Options > Templates & Profiles
• Select in "Clarin Profiles" which profile(s) you want to use as the basis for a CMDI file anc click on Close
• Right-click on Local corpus, choose Add and select the relevant profile (the CMDI profiles are marked with a icon)

Some profiles (obvious tests and the ones not intended for manual metadata creation) have been excluded from the default profile list in arbil (testing). You can see them disabling the "only load profiles selected for manual editing" in the Available Templates & Profiles dialog.

By default, if you create a new profile in the component registry, it will show up in Arbil.

as of Arbil 2.3  there is an item 'Insert Manual Resource Location' in the context menu of CMDI instances in the tree.

See http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/arbil/manual/ch05s02.html

See http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/arbil/manual/ch01s04.html

For CMDI, some additional icons are used and some icons have a slightly different meaning:

	link to an external file (ResourceProxy)
	grouping icon for repeatable elements (more information...)
	root node of a CMDI file

When a component can occur multiple times (= CardinalityMax higher than 1), Arbil automatically groups all occurrences of these components in the CMDI file. You can recognize these by the following properties:

• they have the grey club icon
• the text is shown in grey
• after the node a number indicates how many times the component occurs

E.g. in this example CMDI file there is a fragment that looks like:

<ISO639>
   <iso-639-3-code>cat</iso-639-3-code>
</ISO639>
<ISO639>
   <iso-639-3-code>spa</iso-639-3-code>
</ISO639>

Arbil shows this as:

Right click on the file in the "local corpus" panel and select Edit all Metadata

Correct observation. The elements that are optional (= have a CardinalityMin of 0) are not shown by default. You need to add them explicitly. To do this, right click on the CMDI file in the "local corpus" panel and select Add

Please send a mail with your question to cmdi@clarin.eu