DCMI News 2013

2013-12-04, DCMI is pleased to announce that Marcia Zeng has been elected as inaugural Chair of its Advisory Board and Joseph Busch as Chair-Elect. The Advisory Board is a primary source of expertise informing DCMI activities, serving as DCMI ambassadors, maintaining links between stakeholders in the DCMI community and DCMI, liaising with other metadata and content communities, and serving as a voice of their constituents by drawing the attention of the Initiative to constituent concerns as potential DCMI "work themes". DCMI is in the process of creating a governance structure for the Advisory Board. The election of Advisory Board officers is the first step in that structuring. More information about the charge and membership of the Advisory Board can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/advisory/.

2013-12-04, The W3C Working Group Note Dublin Core to PROV Mapping has been designated a DCMI Recommended Resource. The document provides a mapping between the PROV-O OWL2 ontology and the Dublin Core Terms Vocabulary. The Dublin Core Metadata Terms mapping document is part of the PROV family of documents defining various aspects that are necessary to achieve the vision of inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web. More information regarding the mapping is available at the DCMI Metadata Provenance Task Group homepage at http://dublincore.org/groups/provenance/.

2013-11-07, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Thomas Hickey, Chief Scientist with OCLC Research, will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 4 December 2013 (18:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/H3ccLC). Libraries around the world have a long tradition of maintaining authority files to assure the consistent presentation and indexing of names. As library authority files have become available online, the authority data has become accessible—and many have been published as Linked Open Data (LOD)—but names in one library authority file typically had no link to corresponding records for persons and organizations in other library authority files. After a successful experiment in matching the Library of Congress/NACO authority file with the German National Library's authority file, an online system called the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) was developed to facilitate sharing by ingesting, matching, and displaying the relations between records in multiple authority files. Although the most visible part of VIAF is an HTML interface, the API beneath it supports a linked data view of VIAF with URIs representing the identities themselves, not just URIs for the clusters. It supports names for persons, corporations, geographic entities, works, and expressions. With English, French, German, Spanish interfaces (and a Japanese in process), the system is used around the world, with over a million queries per day. This Webinar will cover some of the challenges VIAF meets in dealing with many different formats and approaches to describing identities, the relationship of VIAF to the source authority files, to other identity systems such as ORCID and ISNI, VIAF's approach to sustainability, governance and persistence, and how ambiguity is recognized and managed. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/authority/. Registration for the webinar closes 4 December 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (17:00 UTC).

2013-10-17, DCMI is pleased to announce that it has named Michael Crandall as inaugural Chair of the Oversight Committee and Eric Childress as the Committee's Chair-Elect. Michael Crandall is a Senior Lecturer in the Information School of the University of Washington and current Director of its iAffiliates Program. Eric Childress provides project management support for OCLC Research projects and participates as a team member and subject matter expert on various OCLC Research and product-related activities focused on metadata, controlled vocabularies, and classification. The Oversight Committee oversees the policies and activities of DCMI, provides oversight and guidance to the Initiative's managing Directorate and contributes to the development and promotion of the Initiative. DCMI is in the process of restructuring the governance of its Oversight Committee and its Advisory Board. The creation of Oversight Committee officers is the first step in that restructuring. More information about the membership of the Oversight Committee can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/oversight/.

2013-10-03, DCMI is please to announce that the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, USA, has joined DCMI as an Institutional Member in the Initiative's revised membership programs. As one of the top programs in the U.S., GSLIS strives to be innovative, bold and dedicated to making a difference in the world of libraries, archives, museums, and in the information industries. Associate Professor Daniel N. Joudrey will represent GSLIS on the DCMI Oversight Committee. Regional, Institutional and Supporting members of DCMI are pivotal to guaranteeing the continuing contributions of DCMI to the metadata community. Information about the revised membership programs is available: http://dublincore.org/support/.

2013-10-03, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Makx Dekkers and Stijn Goedertier will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 30 October 2013 (17:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/19EvBJe). One key challenge for e-Government programs around the world has been the lack of easily accessible information about the metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, code lists, and other reference data that provide interoperability among a broad diversity of data sources. The Asset Description Metadata Schema was developed for exchanging information about such "interoperability assets". The schema was developed with support from the European Commission with the objective of facilitating interoperability across eGovernment programmes in Europe, but it is already proving its usefulness in a wider context, for example to describe specifications maintained by DCMI and W3C. One key implementation of ADMS is in a federation of semantic asset repositories on the Joinup server. Libraries that collect government information will benefit if such information is based on a set of commonly used schemas, vocabularies and code lists, making it easier to aggregate information from multiple sources. This webinar introduces the ADMS schema and discusses examples of its implementation. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/publicsector. Registration for the webinar closes 30 October 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC).

2013-10-03, For the first time in the history of the Dublin Core International Conference, Best Paper and Best Project Report awards have been given from among three papers on the shortlist in each category. The Best Paper Award went to Antoine Isaac, Valentine Charles, Kate Fernie, Costis Dallas, Dimitris Gavrilis, and Stavros Angelis for their paper titled "Achieving Interoperability between the CARARE Schema for Monuments and Sites and the Europeana Data Model". The Best Project Report Award went to Biligsaikhan Batjargal, Takeo Kuyama, Fuminori Kimura, and Akira Maeda for their project report titled "Linked Data Driven Dynamic Web Services for Providing Multilingual Access to Diverse Japanese Humanities Databases". For complete information including runners-up, see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/index/pages/view/awards-2013.

2013-10-03, DCMI has launched an Autumn Membership Drive that continues through 30 November 2013. Individual Members who join before the close of the Drive have the chance to win a free conference registration to DC-2014 in Austin, Texas. DCMI individual and organizational members support the work of DCMI, participate in its governance, and receive benefits such as access to content, discounts for events, and visibility. DCMI is an organization committed to the development and open availability of the specifications and best practice resources that support a healthy global metadata ecosystem. Annual membership dues by DCMI members play a significant role in ensuring that DCMI continues to advance its commitment to support innovation in metadata design and best practice. To find out more about the DCMI membership program, go to http://dublincore.org/support/.

2013-09-12, DCMI is very pleased to announce that Infocom Corporation of Japan has renewed its Supporting Member status until 30 June 2014. Please see the Supporting Member section on the membership page for more details. The Supporting Member program is open for all companies and organizations that want to support DCMI financially to continue its work to the benefit of the global audience.

2013-09-12, The collocated conferences for DC-2013 and iPRES-2013 in Lisbon attracted 392 participants from over 37 countries. In addition to the Tuesday through Thursday conference days comprised of peer-reviewed paper and special sessions, 223 participants attended pre-conference tutorials and 246 participated in post-conference workshops for the collocated events. The peer-reviewed papers and presentations are available on the conference website Presentation page. In sum, it was a great conference.

2013-09-12, On 12 September, DCMI launched its Individual Member program. In addition to Individual Members financially supporting the work of DCMI, they also enjoy the benefits of reduced registration fees for the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications and webinars and tutorials. Regular Individual Memberships are available for practicing professionals as well as a Student category. Retired professionals can join at the Student rate. Organizational memberships remain available for Regional, Institutional and Supporting members. For details of membership, see Join/Support.

2013-08-07, The DCMI-AsiaPac workshop titled "RDA, DC and Linked Data" takes place in Singapore on 15 August in conjunction with IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2013. Karen Coyle will lead the morning session of the workshop and will introduce attendees to the basics of Linked Data, including important vocabulary and concepts. Using familiar examples, participants will build some linked data together and will end with a survey of Linked Data projects in the library community. Sam Oh will lead the afternoon session and will examine converting MARC records and other forms of structured data into Linked Data including the processes of mapping existing data elements to RDF properties and classes and linking to sources of Linked Data authorities such as DBPedia for subject headings and people. Additional information on the workshop can be found at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/BibData/ap2013.

2013-07-17, The Conference Committee of DC-2013 has published the final program of the event. On Monday, 2 September, there will be four half-day Tutorials in parallel tracks with Ivan Herman, Steven Mill, Kai Eckert and Daniel Garijo. The conference on Tuesday through Thursday, 3-5 September, includes three keynotes, paper sessions, project reports, posters, and an array of special sessions. Friday, 6 September is devoted to two full-day workshops: (1) CAMP-4-Data (Cyberinfrastructure and Metadata Protocols); and (2) VocDay 2013 (Managing Vocabularies). You can show your interest at Lanyrd. Twitter stream at @dcmi13, hashtag #dcmi13. Registration is now open. Day registrations are available.

2013-07-17. The RDF representations of the vocabularies created in 2007 to support the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile [1] have been updated. The Accrual Method [2], Accrual Policy [3], and Frequency [4] vocabularies are now declared as SKOS Concept Schemes. These vocabularies (and their PURLs), along with Collection Description Terms [5] and the Collection Description Type vocabulary [6], fall under DCMI's policy for the persistence of formal documents and machine-readable schemas published on the DCMI website [7].

[1] http://dublincore.org/groups/collections/collection-application-profile/
[2] http://purl.org/cld/accmeth/
[3] http://purl.org/cld/accpol/
[4] http://purl.org/cld/freq/
[5] http://purl.org/cld/terms/
[6] http://purl.org/cld/cdtype/
[7] http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/publications/

2013-06-26, On 30 June 2013, DCMI reaches a significant milestone in its history when it ceases operations in Singapore as a company limited by guarantee and starts the next phase of its development as a project of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). DCMI and ASIS&T share a common goal to advance the "research that drives and the practices that sustain new developments". The decision to restructure was motivated by the desire of DCMI's governing Oversight Committee to shape a more dynamic and responsive institutional structure, while retaining DCMI's proven mission, goals and objectives and its commitments to an open, consensus-driven community. ASIS&T has a 75 year history of excellence, beginning as the American Documentation Institute (ADI) in 1937. ADI became ASIS (American Society for Information Science) in 1968 and then ASIS&T with the addition of "Technology" to its name in 2000. In 2013, ASIS&T dropped "American" from it's name and became the Association for Information Science and Technology to better reflect its growing international agenda and membership. A fuller description of the new DCMI/ASIS&T partnership can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/reshaping/.

2013-06-26, The organizing committee of DC-2013 (http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013) has published the preliminary program of the event. On Monday, 2 September there will be four half-day tutorials in two parallel tracks. The program for the conference on Tuesday through Thursday, 3-5 September, includes keynotes and paper sessions, posters and four special sessions. On Friday, 6 September, two full-day workshops will address Managing Vocabularies (VocDay) and Cyber-infrastructure and Metadata Protocols (CAMP-4-Data) for scientific data. DC-2013 is collocated with iPRES and delegates can choose from sessions offered by both conferences. You can show your interest at Lanyrd. Twitter stream at @dcmi13, hashtag #dcmi13. DC-2013 and iPRES share a common registration that is now open at http://ipres2013.ist.utl.pt/registration.html.

2013-06-26, Online registration for DC-2013 in Lisbon is now open at http://ipres2013.ist.utl.pt/registration.html. DC-2013 and iPRES-2013 are collocated and run in parallel. During the event, delegates are welcome to choose sessions that best fit their interests from either conference . Keynotes are held in common plenaries, and, social events are common, providing a excellent opportunity for DCMI and iPRES delegates to socialize, share common interests and network.

2013-05-29, DCMI-AsiaPac will hold a regional workshop in Singapore on 15 August 2013 as part of the DCMI Regional Meetings Series. The theme for the one-day workshop will be "RDA, DC and LOD" and will be comprised of two half-day seminars. The Workshop will be held the day before the IFLA IT Section's conference on "User interaction based on library linked data" on 16 August. IFLA WLIC itself will run from 17-23 Aug 2013. Through the Workshop, the organizers intend to raise the awareness among librarians in the Asian region on the implementation of RDA and how library metadata (specifically DC) can be exposed as linked data to improve visibility and enhance collection usage. The objective is also to build confidence among Asian librarians to work well in the digital arena and be comfortable enough to adopt new technologies that will help improve their libraries' services. A secondary objective is to build a community for the DCMI Asia Task Group where regular discussion on metadata matters can be established. More information about the workshop is available at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/BibData/ap2013.

2013-05-29, DCMI is please to announce that the Information School of the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, has joined DCMI as the inaugural Institutional Member in the Initiative's revised membership programs. As a leading member of the iSchool movement, the University of Washington Information School is a model for other information schools around the globe. Assistant Professor Joseph T. Tennis will represent the Information School on the DCMI Oversight Committee. Regional, Institutional and Supporting members of DCMI are pivotal to guaranteeing the continuing contributions of DCMI to the metadata community. Information about the revised membership programs is available at http://dublincore.org/about/membershipPrograms/.

2013-05-08, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with John Fereira will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 22 May 2013 (17:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/157qF2S). This webinar will present the perspectives of a software developer on the practicalities of building a high-quality Semantic-Web search service on existing data maintained in dozens of formats and software platforms at large, diverse institutions using Vivo, a semantic web application focused on discovering researchers and research publications in the life sciences. Using a built-in, editable ontology for describing things such as People, Courses, and Publications, data is transformed into a Semantic-Web-compliant form. VIVO provides automated and self-updating processes for improving data quality and authenticity. The webinar will highlight services that leverage the Semantic Web platform in innovative ways, e.g., for finding researchers based on the text content of a particular Web page and for visualizing networks of collaboration across institutions. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/vivo/. Registration for the webinar closes 22 May 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC).

2013-04-17, The DC-2013 Special Session titled Long-term Preservation and Governance of RDF Vocabularies will be sponsored by W3C and will focuses on issues related to the usability of RDF vocabularies in the long term (as defined in "decades") including continued access to documentation, inheritance of ownership and maintenance responsibility, and the continued resolvability of domain names. The usability of Linked Data relies on the ability to interpret what the data means, which depends on the availability of the RDF vocabularies used in the data. RDF vocabularies are created by a wide range of people and institutions, from individual researchers to national libraries and for-profit corporations, for a wide range of descriptive requirements. The oldest RDF vocabularies in existence are just fifteen years old. It is time to look systematically at how ownership and responsibility for today's vocabularies will pass to the next generation. For a fuller description, see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/index/pages/view/vocPres. DC-2013 will be held in Lisbon 2-6 September 2013. The conference website can be found at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013.

2013-03-20, DCMI seeks community feedback on a proposed DCMI Recommended Resource. The deadline for feedback is 7 April 2013. The DCMI Metadata Provenance Task Group is collaborating with the W3C Provenance Working Group on a mapping from Dublin Core terms to the PROV provenance ontology, currently a W3C Proposed Recommendation. The final state of the document will be that of a W3C Note, to be published as part of a suite of documents in support of a W3C Recommendation for provenance interchange. Details for providing feedback are available at http://dublincore.org/#technical.

2013-03-20, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Alan Danskin of The British Library will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time (17:00 UTC) on 24 April 2013. Registration for this webinar closes 24 April 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC). A seminar at the British Library in April 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of a 2007 meeting at which representatives of the Dublin Core, Semantic Web, and RDA communities jointly recommended that the then-draft cataloging standard RDA be provided in the form of vocabularies and application profiles usable for Linked Data. One year after this anniversary meeting and one year closer to the general deployment of RDA in libraries, this webinar will take stock of progress towards developing application profiles based on RDA and discuss the practicalities of exposing RDA-based data in the Linked Data cloud. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/rda/.

2013-02-28. The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced the publication of a maintenance revision of The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2012). The new version of the ANSI/NISO standard corresponds to version 1.1 of the specification on the DCMI website at http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Additional information about Z39.85-2012 can be found on the NISO Project Page.

2013-02-01, The deadline for submissions to DC-2013 in Lisbon has been set for 29 March. The call for participation is available at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013/cfp. Submissions are being accepted for full papers, project reports, and posters. Special session proposals are also being accepted. DC-2013 is being collocated with iPRES 2013 in Lisbon, Portugal on 2-6 September 2013.

2013-02-01, DCMI and iPRES are pleased to announce that they will be holding a Joint Doctoral Symposium on 2 September 2013 at their collocated conferences in Lisbon, Portugal. A specific call for contributions will be issued and will be available at http://purl.org/dcevents/dc-2013/cds. The Symposium and the collocated conferences will provide the Symposium participants with the opportunity to engage with colleagues from around the world and contribute to the development of their research and social networks. The co-chairs of the Symposium are Eva Méndez, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain and Artur Caetano, IST/INESC-ID, Portugal.