2000-07-18: Tool Upgrade:
DC-dot is now conformant with the
recently recommended Dublin Core
Qualifiers
DC-dot, UKOLN's web-based Dublin Core
generator and editor is now conformant
with the Dublin Core Metadata Element
Set, Version 1.1: Reference
Description and the recently
recommended Dublin Core
Qualifiers.
What does this mean?
- All DC-dot help files have been
updated in line with the DC 1.1
reference description.
- Any encoding schemes that DC-dot
assigns automatically to element values
conform to the recommended
qualifiers.
- The DC 1.1 namespace URI is used in
the RDF generated by DC-dot.
- The DC Type pull-down menu offers
values from the DCMI Type encoding
scheme.
2000-07-12: New Project: The
Victorian Education Channel
Home Page: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/
(Site is still under development)
The Victorian Education Channel (an
educational gateway for the State of
Victoria, Australia) has been developed
to integrate access to educational
information and services available on the
web. In particular, it provides
integrated access to resources from the
Department of Education, Employment and
Training (DEET), Victoria and associated
providers. It also supports discovery of
other resources pertinent to Victorian
education. The Channel is for teachers,
students, parents and the community -
anyone requiring information with an
educational focus - and covers all
sectors of education from early school to
tertiary and vocational.
The Victorian Education Channel uses
the standard 15 Dublin Core (DC) elements
and 'audience' as an extra element (as
recommended by the DC-Education Working
Group). All elements have qualifiers, are
expressed in RDF, and many have
controlled vocabularies or recommended
formats. Elements can be repeated and are
not mandatory although for national
interoperability, a minimal set is
required. The DC classification is backed
up by a full text indexing capability. DC
records are created using a 'workbench'
that combines original authoring or
metadata with harvesting of pre-existing
metadata, in HTML or RDF. The workbench
also 'putates' values that the author can
choose to ratify. The records are
searched by default or user-structured
searches or browsed.
Searches are complemented by access to
the full-text indexes. Dewey DC has been
included as a global taxonomy to
complement the more locally-relevant
taxonomies but it is not expected that
all resources will be classified using
this facility.
DEET has been actively classifying
resources for several years so the
channel is being populated by a
combination of imported, existing records
and newly created records. The channel
will be supported by resource authoring,
and other systems, that either contribute
to the generation of classification
records or use the information in the
records as data for user-specific
applications.
2000-06-25: Tool Upgrade:
DC-dot now provides support for the W3C
XHTML 1.0 Recommendation
DC-dot, UKOLN's web-based Dublin Core
generator and editor now provides support
for the W3C XHTML 1.0 recommendation.
To use this feature, create your DC
metadata in the normal way. Then choose
'XHTML' from the 'Display format' pull
down menu.
XHTML
1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on 26
January 2000. It is a reformulation of
HTML 4.01 in XML, bringing the rigor of
XML to HTML, and can be put to immediate
use with existing browsers by following a
few simple guidelines.
The key differences between
<meta> elements in XHTML and HTML 4
are that:
- element names must be in lower-case
- <meta> rather than
<META>
- empty elements (for example,
<meta> and <link>) must end
with '/>'
