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Purpose and Scope of the DCMI Registry (Phase 1)

Introduction

This document identifies the scope of the Phase 1 DCMI Open Metadata Registry. It represents consensus reached by the DCMI Executive Committee based on discussions within the Registry workgroup and experience gained from the development and evaluation of two Registry Prototypes.

The Registry application will be developed in phases. The focus for phase 1 will be to address the immediate needs of the DCMI community. It is expected that subsequent phases will expand upon this scope statement.

Information on discussions and decisions that were used to support the creation of this scope statement are available from the Registry working group home page and the Registry working group mailing list.

Scope Statement (Phase 1)

• To assist the DCMI in the management and evolution of the DC vocabulary by:
• Providing a human-readable, multilingual, Web interface for navigating and searching DC terms. This interface should include links to annotations, guidelines and other relevant documents.
• Providing an authoritative source for identifying the status of a term and it's relationship to other terms.
• To provide a secure Web interface for adding new terms, and managing term revisions, that have been approved by the DC Usage Board.
• To provide a secure interface for adding new translations, and updating translations, of the Label, Definition and Comment properties associated with each term.
• To provide a user-friendly interface to comprehensive information about DC terms, the relationship between those terms, and their usage. This information should be available to all individuals (implementors of resource discovery systems, information professionals, DC Usage Board, etc.) seeking information about the DCMI.
• To provide an authoritative source of all DC terms, including elements, qualifiers, controlled vocabularies and encoding schemes.
• To produce matadata schemas of the DC vocabulary in both XML and RDF encoding formats.

Scope Statement (Subsequent Phases)

It is expected that subsequent phases will expand upon this scope statement and will include a broader level of support for the metadata community. The future scope of the Registry might include:

• A peer-to-peer API providing a machine-readable interface for navigating and searching terms.
• Support for infusing various encoding schemes, including RDF schemas, XML Schemas and, possibly, application profiles.
• The ability to register authoritative mappings and crosswalks between DC and other vocabularies.
• The ability to register proposed encoding schemes.

References

[PROTOTYPES] DCMI Registry Prototypes
http://wip.dublincore.org:8080/registry/Registry

[WG-HOME] DCMI Registry Working Group
http://dublincore.org/groups/registry/

[WG-LIST] DCMI Registry Mailing List
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-registry.html