Editing EPrints4 Core Roadmap (section)

===Data set / Data objects===

* DataSet/Objects are collections of metadata fields and offer an API for easily manipulating objects/data.
* Dataset offers a number of properties to handle common fields/concepts in a consistent manner across different datasets. For instance the "lastmod" property which is an internal field always set to when the object was last modified or "history" which keeps track of the modifications of the object. Considered properties:
** "states": the graph of states for that object. Similar to "eprint_status" for "eprint" objects in EPrints2/3. Automates and generalises state transfer for objects.
** "revision": keep the revision number which is incremented each time that object is modified (default: ON)
** "acl": enables the ACL related fields and permission checking (TODO)
** "cache": enables the use of memcached (default: ON if globally enabled) - if enabled, keep a copy of data objects in memory rather than reading objects from DB.
** "read-only": makes that data-set read only and forbids any modification/deletion (default: OFF)
** "history": keeps an XML diff of the modifications made to that object. (TODO)
** "lastmod": keeps a last modified field
** "datestamp": the date at which the object was created
* EPrints::DataObj now contains all required information so that custom datasets do not need to have their explicit implementation (EPrints::DataObj::Foo package)

Question: EPrints2/3 does not offer a generalised manner to reference a sub-dataset: "archive" is used as a short-cut for "eprint:archive" but because the dataset naming is global you can't re-use "archive" for other datasets. So we need a common way to reference a dataset. eprint:inbox? eprint/inbox? eprint_inbox?