Post-IFLA Satellite Meeting Information Technology and DCMI State of the

1. Post-IFLA Satellite Meeting Information Technology and DCMI State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Stuart L. Weibel Senior Research Scientist OCLC Office of Research Göttingen August 11, 2003

2. Outline • DCMI Goals and Roles • Ongoing activities • Relationships to (and with) other metadata activities • Process and leadership of DCMI • DC-2003 activities in Seattle

3. What is the value we are creating? • Easier discovery of information assets • Better organization of information • Improved manageability of resources • Bringing together traditional tools with new technology A community of shared values of collaboration that encourages investment of social capital

4. DC’s Niche • International, cross-domain resource discovery • Extensible architecture • Spectrum of simple to more complex • Lego™ Metaphor: Modular building blocks used to develop application profiles of mixed metadata • Leverage existing knowledge organization idioms (thesauri, classification systems, ontologies, local vocabularies)

5. DCMI’s Unique Role:three I’s • International • 20 + languages in the DCMI metadata registry • Participants from 50 countries • Independant • Not bound to country, institution or industry: accountable to its stakeholders • Open (Influenceable) • Governance and decision-making based on open participation and public process

6. Some Milestones Since Florence • ISO approval • DC-Usage Board Decisions • Documentation • Consolidated terms document • Encoding Guidelines (RDF and XML) • ASKDCMI online help system • New Using Dublin Core documentation • Liaison activities with IEEE-LOM and IMS

7. Documentation and Outreach • Consolidated DCMI terms document • ASKDCMI – question answering system for DCMI: questions are distributed to registered experts • Encoding guides in RDF and XML continue to mature • Using Dublin Core User Guide updated • Online Courses in planning stages

8. Liaison and coordination activities • DCMI/IEEE-LOM Joint Task Force • Accessibility metadata – IMS and DCMI • Rights Declarations

9. DCMI/IEEE-LOM Joint Task Force • Instructional support systems require descriptive metadata as well as instructional process metadata • Functional requirements for these systems are as yet only vaguely understood • Joint Task force involves participation from DCMI, IEEE-LOM, IMS, LTSC • Understand the problem better, refine functional requirements, arrive at a common abstraction for the underlying model, build modular systems

10. IMS-DCMI Accessibilitymetadata • Joint effort to address accessibility metadata • Basic concept: Access constraints are related to capabilities of users, devices, and resource formats. Metadata can be used to better align these three variables

11. DC-Rights Proposal • Stuart Weibel and Eric Miller • Rights declarations rather than rights management: inform rather than enforce • Designed for (but not limited to) Creative Commons (CC) licenses • Identify Rights holders and licenses • CC licenses are, in general, designed to promote use of resources, while reserving the basic rights of authorship

12. Relationship of DCMI to OtherStandards and Protocols

13. DC MARC and its variants IEEE-LOM/IMS MPEG FGDC EAD ONIX OAI TEI XRML and ODRML DAML/OIL/OWL METS and MODS SCORM And more… The Sum of all Peers:Digital libraries as a Metadata Switch There are many encoding issues, many semantic standards, many protocol issues… and they are changing all the time.

14. The Resource Grid stewardship stewardship high low high low Books Journals Newspapers Government docs Audiovisual Maps Scores Freely-accessible web resources Open source software Newsgroup archives low low uniqueness Special collections Rare books Local/Historical Newspapers Local history materials Archives & manuscripts Theses & dissertations • Institutional repositories • ePrints • Learning objects/materials • Research data high high

15. Metadata Standards in the Resource Grid stewardship high low Books Journals MARC, DC ONIX, MPEG Freely-accessible web resources DC low Unique- ness Institutional assets Special collections DC, DDI, IEEE/LOM, FGDC, EAD, TEI, SCORM high MARC, METS, EAD, DC, TEI

16. Tower of [meta] Babel How do we make a coherent whole from the plethora of metadata standards and formats? Hand-done mappings will work in a limited way - DC-MARC - MARC-ONIX - IMS-ONIX…. Etc etc etc Automated mapping is necessary

17. Approaches to Interoperability • Pre-coordinated Mapping • Agreements about common denominator metadata • Metadata Registries • Tools for design and mapping among metadata standards • “Recombinant” Metadata Mapping • Declaration of semantics can be flexible and adaptive: Goal of Semantic Web Research

18. Registries can prescribe, describe, proscribe • Prescribe definitions and recommend usage • Describe how terms are actually used • Monitor usage through collecting examples • Editors and usage boards must strike a balance between prescription and description. • Possibly proscription as well?

19. DCMI Registry • Stores official metadata element definitions in a central database (or federated databases?) • Managing a namespace (as a standards agency): publish qualifiers as available, with version control • Managing translations of the standard in multiple languages • Additional Possibilities: • User guide interface? • Support for standardisation processes (peer review) • Downloadable input to software tools for generating, editing, validating DC metadata • Schema management and visibility

20. To Summarize… • Traditional views of interoperability depend on pre-coordinated agreements about every aspect of syntax, structure, and semantics- everyone speaks the same language • In the Internet Commons, this degree of coordination is hard to come by • Schema declarations allow applications to search, access, display, and link metadata from arbitrary schemas that share declaration conventions • Registries are the online dictionaries that support such applications • Much of this topic remains in the research domain

21. Governance, Process and Leadership • DCMI Governance and Process • Usage Board Activities • Leadership Changes • Affiliate Program

22. Governance and Process • Board of Trustees • Representatives from Libraries, Commerce, Industry, Academics, Supranational agencies in North America, Europe, and Asia • Usage Board and supporting processes • Appointed editorial board for managing the evolution of DCMI vocabularies • Affiliates • Memberships chartered at the national level to regionalize Dublin Core and support a world-wide ownership and governance

24. Leadership of the Initiative • Leadership of DCMI passed from Stuart Weibel to Makx Dekkers in July of 2003 • Reflects a natural evolution of the initiative • Starting and managing activities require different skill sets • OCLC remains host currently, but strong push to distribute governance and support of the initiative

25. National Affiliates • Contribution to the operating costs of DCMI • National or regional DCMI franchise • Regional source of advice and expertise for local applications • Local maintenance of translations of DCMI specifications and documentation • Finland became the first DCMI Affiliate in May of 2003 • Others under discussion

26. DC-2003: Seattle Supporting Communities of Discourse and Practice: Metadata Research and Applications

27. Seattle Slew:a full agenda • DC-Advisory Board, Board of Trustee, and DC-Usage Board meetings • DC-Commerce pre-conference workshop (separate registration) • LTSC Collocation meeting • Tutorials • Working Group meetings • Conference papers

28. DC-Commerce • Pre-Conference Workshop in Seattle • How to make DC Metadata commerce-friendly • Common conventions, • Encoding approaches, • Applications • Interoperability

29. Collection Description Internationalization Libraries Corporate Architecture Environment Registries Education Government Agents & Rights Working Group Meetings planned for Seattle

30. Danke, Sehr! weibel@oclc.org http://dublincore.org