2000-04-17: Approved Dublin Core
Interoperability Qualifiers
Announced
The DC-Usage Committee has completed balloting
of the initial round of proposed
Dublin Core Interoperability Qualifiers.
These qualifiers are intended to promote
interoperability among applications that use
element refinements and encoding schemes to
increase the semantic precision of metadata.
Principles of
Qualification
In judging the suitability of proposed
qualifiers, the DC Usage Committee recognized two
basic categories of qualifiers. It is expected
that these categories will aid application
designers in developing coherent local qualifiers
as well.
1. Encoding Schemes
These qualifiers are pointers to schemes that
aid in the interpretation of an element value.
These schemes include controlled vocabularies and
formal notations. A value expressed using an
Encoding Scheme will thus be a token selected
from a vocabulary (e.g., a term from a
classification system or set of subject headings)
or a string formatted in accordance with a
notation (e.g., "2000-01-01" as the standard
expression of a date).
2. Element Refinements
These qualifiers make an element's meaning
more specific without extending its meaning. A
refined element shares the meaning of the
unqualified element, but with a more restricted
scope.
Local versus interoperability qualifiers
Application designers should keep in mind that
the present set of qualifiers is not intended to
satisfy all applications, and that meeting local
functional requirements with additional local
elements and qualifiers is expected. It is
expected that as local qualifiers are
demonstrated to be of broader use that they will
attract wider deployment and be considered for
adoption as DC Interoperability Qualifiers.
Syntactic Encodings
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative will issue
recommendations in the near future about
syntactic encoding of approved qualified Dublin
Core in HTML, XML, and RDF.
The DC Usage Committee
The DC Usage Committee is a subset of the DC
Advisory Committee. Its membership, listed below,
includes representation of librarians, museum
informatics, digital library researchers, the
instructional metadata community, and system
implementers from 8 countries on 4 continents.
These individuals have invested countless hours
since the Frankfurt metadata conference in a
difficult, often contentious task. Many thanks
are due them for their efforts.
| Simon Cox |
Renato Iannella |
Jon Mason |
| David Bearman |
Priscilla Caplan |
Traugott Koch |
| Juha Hakala |
Diane Hillmann |
Stuart Weibel |
| Andy Powell |
Makx Dekkers |
Leif Andresen |
| Roland Schwaenzl |
Tom Baker |
Rebecca Guenther |
| Eric Childress |
Stuart Sutton |
Sigfrid Lundberg |
| Warwick Cathro |
Erik Jul |
Rachel Heery |
| Diann Rusch-Feja |
Eric Miller |
Shigeo Sugimoto |
| John Kunze |
Carl Lagoze |
|
Ratification of a proposed qualifier required
approval by 2/3 of the members of the DC Usage
Committee who cast votes.
