Global navigation options:	Home	Metadata Basics	DCMI Specifications	Community and Events	About Us	Support DCMI

Search:

Status DCMI July 2003: overview

Organization and management

As recently announced on DC-General, a leadership transition took place on 1 July 2003, when Stu Weibel stepped down as Executive Director of DCMI. The DCMI Directorate now consists of Makx Dekkers, the Managing Director, and Tom Baker, the chair of the DCMI Usage Board. The DCMI Board of Trustees provides strategic guidance and the DCMI Advisory Board will continue to advise the Directorate on technical and operational issues.

The DCMI Board of Trustees had a meeting on 25 April 2003 in Budapest, Hungary. A short report of the meeting is posted elsewhere on the DCMI Web site.

The DCMI Usage Board had a meeting on 16 and 17 June 2003 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. A short report of the meeting is posted elsewhere on the DCMI Web site. Updated versions reflecting the decisions taken in Ithaca of DCMI Metadata Terms and of the RDF schemas at http://purl.org/dc/terms and http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype are scheduled to be available in August 2003.

Affiliate Program

In May 2003, the National Library of Finland became DCMI's first National Affiliate. The DCMI Affiliate program is intended to provide a stronger link between local communities of practice and the Initiative. Affiliates will help promote the adoption of Dublin Core specifications, and provide a training and consulting foundation to help promulgate adoption of DC specifications. They will also maintain translations of base DCMI standards and documentation as appropriate for the locale. Affiliates will help support the infrastructure and management of DCMI, and in return, will assume a growing governance role in the Initiative. The DCMI Directorate is discussing the Affiliate model with candidates for national affiliates in several countries.

Standardization

Version 1.1 of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set is now officially an Internation Standard under number ISO 15836. The text of the standard is available at http://www.niso.org/international/SC4/n515.pdf.

AskDCMI

In April 2003, DCMI introduced a new Question and Answer service for the community: AskDCMI. This service is based on the virtual reference infrastructure developed by the Information Institute of Syracuse as part of the Virtual Reference Desk project. A number of experts from the Usage Board and the Advisory Board have agreed to answer questions from the community. Selected questions and answers will be available in a searchable archive.

Technical developments

The Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML became a DCMI Recommendation in April 2003 after a public comment period in March 2003.

An monthly updated overall deliverable schedule is available at (http://dublincore.org/news/communications/deliverables.shtml).

Working and Interest Group highlights:

DCMI Administrative Metadata

The WG has finalised the work on AC - Administrative Components: Dublin Core DCMI Administrative Metadata. The future of the WG is now under consideration.

DCMI Citation

The WG has assembled a list of bibliographic citation styles in general use. These could be used as schemes for use with dcterms:bibliographicCitation. The list will be maintained as a working group resource.

DCMI Architecture

The Architecture group discussed various issues related to the expression of Dublin Core metadata in RDF, the RDF Schema and provided feedback to the working draft Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements.

DCMI Corporate

DC-Corporate is a closed, unmoderated list for managers, developers and designers of corporate metadata systems and policies. The goal of this list is to put participants in closer touch with developments in the DCMI community that are particularly relevant to the corporate metadata milieu, thereby promoting metadata solutions that serve local corporate objectives while increasing the prospects for interoperable metadata that can be shared up and down supply chains. Registration is now available for Metadata and Search: Global Corporate Circle DCMI 2003 Workshop to be held on Sunday, September 28, 2003 in Seattle. This all day workshop will focus on internal or site search technology, as opposed to external, Internet or web search technology (although some technology is applicable to both internal and external search applications). There will be presentations by experts, implementation case studies from DC-Corporate community, demonstrations by search technology vendors, and several Q&A sessions.

DCMI Environment

The DC-Environment Interest Group continued its work as a forum for individuals and organisations involved in implementing Dublin Core in the environmental domain. Currently the IG is working on a status paper on environmental terminology. Another focus is the use of metadata standards for management and discovery of georeferenced information. Mapping the Dublin Core Metadata standard to ISO 19115 and guidance for the use of the element dc:coverage are of specific interest. Furthermore, the IG is continuing to update the reference document on the use of metadata in the environmental domain.

DCMI Standards

This group was converted to a IG from a WG in spring 2003 in conjuntionwith final approvement of ISO 15836 as a formal ISO standard. At the ISO TC46/SC4 meeting in Rome in May 2003 several national bodies announced national standards based on ISO 15836.

DCMI Type

The WG has developed proposals for two additons to the DCMI Type Vocabulary: Moving Image and Still Image. This work was led by Simon Pockley of ACMI. The proposals were completed at the beggining of May 2003 and submitted for review by the DC Usage Board at their meeting in June 2003, following a public comment period.

DCMI Registry

The Registry WG has focused on two tasks since the last breakout session:completion of phase 2 of the metadata registry, as outlined in the functional requirements gathered at our last breakout session (see this message on the DC-Registry list.) and implementing a distributed architecture for the Registry.

In May 2003, an application interface to the Registry was delivered. The services are described at: http://dublincore.org/services/inspection.wsil (machine-readable) and http://wip.dublincore.org/ (human-readable). A sample application was also delivered which serves as an open-source example of how to use the application interface.

Progress has also been made in implementing a distributed architecture for the registry. The first distributed registry was installed at ULIS, in Tsukuba, Japan in May 2003 and preliminary work has begun on installing additional registries at the University of Göttingen, Germany and at UKOLN in Bath England.

Conference schedule

DC-2003 will be held in Seattle WA, USA, from 28 September to 2 October 2003. After the deadline for submissions of papers on 3 May 2003 (extended to 17 May 2003), the Program Committee has been working hard on reviewing the submitted papers. A preliminary program for the conference and workshop is expected in early August 2003. Online registration is now open. For further details, see the conference Web site.

Community

In June 2003, the total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working and Interest groups was 3,049. The general mailing list DC-General had 962 subscribers. The five largest working and interests groups were: DCMI Libraries (372 subscribers), DCMI Education (294), DCMI Government (192), DCMI Architecture (138) and DCMI Environment (132).

The DCMI Web site had an average number of visitors of around 40,000 per month in the first half year of 2003.

Makx Dekkers/2003-07-07