We recognize there are several outstanding issues with XOBIS. For instance, we have tried, in a document on the XOBIS web site, to define where the lines between principal elements should be drawn. Additional distinctions may need to be made as more records are translated into XOBIS.
We also need to investigate several complementary standards.
We need, for instance, to adopt an XML-based access control language to control access to XOBIS records. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel by creating our own version of this standard since other acceptable ACL schemas already exist in the XML community.
We are also interested in, and investigating, the idea of internationalizing the XOBIS structure. While XOBIS currently supports setting the language of almost any text element, more work is needed to make it truly customizable.
The first thing on the agenda, though, is the creation of an XMLMARC map to convert our MARC records into the XOBIS format. We expect to start on this in January.