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Status DCMI February 2003: overview

Organization and management

The DCMI Board of Trustees, DCMI Advisory Board and DCMI Usage Board all had face-to-face meetings in October 2002 in Florence, in conjunction with the annual conference.

The Board of Trustees discussed the organizational priorities of DCMI and scenarios for sustainable funding of the Initiative. It was identified that a priority for DCMI in the next year is to provide better documentation on how to implement Dublin Core metadata in a variety of environments.

The Advisory Board discussed practical approaches to activity and resource planning and looked at the achievements and priorities of the various Working and Interest Groups. After the Florence conference, the chairs of Working and Interest Groups published reports of meetings in Florence and proposed work plans for 2003. A new Interest Group was created in the area of Knowledge Management in global corporations (http://dublincore.org/groups/corporate/). A new overall deliverable schedule for 2003 is available at (http://dublincore.org/news/communications/deliverables.shtml).

The Usage Board discussed clarifications to its documentation and process, issues related to machine-readable schemas for Dublin Core, and proposals from DC-Government and DC-Libraries. In January 2003, Andrew Wilson of the National Archives of Australia was appointed as new Usage Board member.

Strategic and Financial Plan 2003-2005

The DCMI Directorate has prepared a Strategic and Financial Plan for the years 2003-2005 that is currently under consideration by the Board of Trustees. The plan discusses the activities and audiences of DCMI for the next three years and foresees development of an Affiliate Program and application for grants and sponsorship.

Affiliate Program

On the basis of recommendations of the Board of Trustees, the DCMI Directorate has prepared the model Affiliate Agreement that is currently being discussed with candidates for national affiliates in several countries.

Standardization

Version 1.1 of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has been balloted in ISO as DIS 15836. In January 2003, the ballot finished with 18 'yes' and no 'no' votes. Publication as International Standard is expected in Spring 2003.

Web site and documentation

With the increase of information available on the DCMI Web site in the last year, navigation on the site needs to be redesigned. A new version of the home page with a smaller number of links will be installed in late February 2003, while a more thorough redesign is being planned. After the departure of the DCMI Web master in November 2002, the maintenance of the Web site is being reorganized. In the interim, Web site publication is now scheduled at one-month intervals.

In recent months, the structure and layout of the reference documentation (element set, qualifiers, type vocabulary) that was produced by the Usage Board in summer 2002 has been revised, in response to several suggestions from the community. A new version will become available for the public in late February 2003. In Spring 2003, a new feedback service will be introduced.

Technical developments

The specification of the expression of simple Dublin Core metadata in RDF/XML became a DCMI Recommendation in October 2002 (http://dublincore.org/documents/2002/05/15/dcq-rdf-xml/).

The specification for the RDF/XML expression of qualified Dublin Core and the finalization of the necessary RDF schemas are being progressed further in co-operation with representatives of the Semantic Web community, taking into account recent changes in the W3C RDF specifications.

The Proposed Recommendation for the expression of Dublin Core in XML will be available for Public Comment during the month of March 2003 (http://dublincore.org/documents/2002/12/02/dc-xml-guidelines/).

A new XML schema for simple Dublin Core was published in December 2002 (http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/simpledc20021212.xsd).

The Registry working group is continuing its work with the definition of the requirements for version two that is scheduled to be available by summer 2003.

Conference schedule

The annual conference in 2002, held in Florence, Italy, was a success. Around 210 participants from 25 countries participated. The keynotes, papers and posters of the conference are available at http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/. The printed proceedings are available from Firenze University Press.

DC-2003 will be held in Seattle WA, USA, from 28 September to 2 October 2003. For further details, see the conference Web site at http://www.ischool.washington.edu/dc2003/. The event will consist of Conference, Workshop, and Tutorial tracks. The call for papers is open until 3 May 2003.

Community

In January 2003, the total number of subscriptions to the DCMI mailing lists was just over 3,100, an increase of 700 (+29%) in comparison with January 2002. The general mailing list DC-General had 955 subscribers (+10%); the five largest working and interests groups were DC-Libraries (361 subscribers, +10%), DC-Education (289, +23%), DC-Government (182, +24%), DC-Architecture (133, +20%) and DC-Environment (131, new group in 2002).

Makx Dekkers/2003-02-25