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Makx Dekkers/2003-09-15
The main organizational change this year took place on 1 July 2003, when Stu Weibel stepped down as Executive Director of DCMI. Since that day, the DCMI Directorate consists of Makx Dekkers, the Managing Director, and Tom Baker, the chair of the DCMI Usage Board. Under Stu's leadership since 1995, DCMI has grown from a series of invitational workshops where participants aimed to find common solutions to resource discovery on the Web, to an international, consensus-based, open organization that develops and maintains the most successful metadata standard, and involves participants from all corners of the world. Much of this success is due to Stu's vision, enthusiasm and charisma. Fortunately, Stu will remain involved in the practical activities of DCMI.
There have been also other changes regarding people working with DCMI: Paul Miller of UKOLN replaced Jon Mason of Education Australia as co-chair of DCMI Education; Robina Clayphan of the British Library replaced Rebecca Guenther of the Library of Congress as chair of DCMI Libraries; Mary Woodley of California State University Northridge replaced Diane Hillmann of Cornell University as chair of DCMI User Guides; Olga Barysheva of the National Library of Russia stepped down as co-chair of DCMI Localization and Internationalization. The Usage Board welcomed Andrew Wilson of the National Archives of Australia as its ninth member. The new chairs and co-chairs listed above have become members of the Advisory Board. Two more new members were invited to the Advisory Board: Jani Stenvall from Helsinki University Library and the National Library of Finland as representative of the DCMI Affiliate in Finland, and Wei Liu from Shanghai Library.
The Board of Trustees met twice in the last year: October 2002, Florence and May 2003, Budapest. The Board discussed ongoing activities and reviewed organizational plans including the DCMI Directorate leadership transition, status of current working group activities, strategic opportunities, funding opportunities and financial status of DCMI. An important result in the last year was the establishment of the DCMI Affiliate Program early in 2003. The Board will meet again in Seattle on 27 September 2003.
The DCMI Usage Board held its mid-year meeting on 16-17 June 2003 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The meeting made good progress on a number of issues: documentation and process; alignment of DCMI and ISO documentation; user guidelines; the new AskDCMI service; namespaces for attributes of DCMI terms; clarifying Structured Values in the context of a new Abstract Model proposed by Andy Powell; related dependencies on DCMI grammatical principles; MARC Relator terms as refinements of Contributor (involving the formal declaration of cross-references on the part of DCMI and Library of Congress); the prototype public front-end for "registering" Encoding Schemes; and the Libraries application profile and related encoding schemes. A proposal to add Still Image and Moving Image as sub-types of Image was approved, though finalization of this decision was ultimately postponed until the Seattle meeting due to the dependency of this decision on additions to the underlying grammatical principles.
The meeting of the Usage Board scheduled for 27-28 September in Seattle will focus on finalizing a number of the decisions taken in Ithaca by putting into place the needed documentation and clarifications of grammatical principles (e.g., sub-types, Abstract Model) and by evaluating formal expressions with regard to MARC Relator terms. In addition, the Board will review a proposal from the DCMI Citation Working Group for "DCMICite", a Structured Value.
The DCMI Advisory Board will hold its anual meeting in Seattle on 3 October 2003. Issues for discussion will be the status and progress of the work in Working Groups and Interest Groups and the workplan for 2003-2004.
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. There will also be a Special Session on DCMI Affiliates at DC-2003.
Version 1.1 of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set became an International Standard under number ISO 15836-2003. The (preliminary) text of the standard is available at http://www.niso.org/international/SC4/n515.pdf. The official publication is expected in Autumn 2003. A small group of people is looking at issues related to maintenance of the official standard versions, and considering revision of RFC2413 to bring this in line with the ISO text.
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 are available in a searchable archive.
The Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML became a DCMI Recommendation in April 2003 after a public comment period in March 2003.
The document "Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements" is now moving forward towards a DCMI Proposed Recommendation. The Public Comment period for this document is expected to start in October 2003.
A new work item concerning the definition of an Abstract Model is currently under discussion in the Architecture Working Group.
Several members of the DCMI community were involved in work that took place as part of the MMI-DC Workshop under the section Information Society Standards System (ISSS) of CEN, the European Committee for Standardization. As a result of this work, a new version of CWA 13988, "Information for the use of Dublin Core in Europe" was published in April 2003. Several other deliverables from this Workshop are expected to be published later in 2003, including "Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines", "Guidance material for mapping between Dublin Core and ISO in the Geographic Information domain", "Mapping between Dublin Core and the ISO standard DIS 19115 (Geographic Information - metadata)", "Draft spatial Application Profile", "Guidance on the use of metadata in eGovernment" and "Dublin Core eGovernment Application Profile". Work is underway to define a number of work items for the MMI-DC Workshop in 2004.
Other liaisons are being maintained with the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC), ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29: MPEG Standardization of Coded Representation of Audio, Picture, Multimedia and Hypermedia Information, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36: Standards For Information Technology for Learning, Education, and Training, the Open Archives Initiative, the RDF Core Working Group, and the Semantic Web activity at W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). For a full list, see the page on DCMI Liaisons and Other Metadata Activities.
As part of the work to establish a roadmap identifying activities and actors, a meeting was held in Washington, DC in January, hosted by NIST. Many activities were identified (UK and Canadian Governments, IMS, INCITS V2 and W3C) and members of the DCMI Accessibility Group were actively engaged in a range of activities. An effort was made in early 2003 to seek funding for DCMI Accessibility work through participation in a European Sixth Framework Proposal; however, this turned out to be premature in terms of collaboration with other groups in Europe. There will be two working sessions at DC-2003 for those interested in standardizing the specifications for metadata relating to accessibility.
The goal of DCMI Administrative Metadata Working Group was to propose an element set for the management of metadata based on the work with "Admin Core - Administrative Container Metadata (A-Core)". The final specification "AC - Administrative Components - Dublin Core DCMI Administrative Metadata" is now under consideration in the DCMI Advisory Board.
In 2002-2003, the Agents group was working on four separate threads, achieving partial success on three of them. The group managed to articulate the main issues in two sides of the long-standing debate on whether to allow e-mail addresses, affiliations, and URIs in the Creator, Contributor, and Publisher elements. Recently, a synthesis of these two sides has been attempted and returned to the group for further discussion. A proposal for a 3-component Agent linking convention was submitted to the group, but reaction has been limited so far.
One thread that did not produce results this year concerns a feasibility investigation into the requirements for an Agent Core. Reasons for the delay are that those responsible were generally overcommitted and that the problem space is changing its focus more rapidly than the group can follow given the infrequency of communication (electronic or in-person). We attribute the delays and partial results on the other threads to similar considerations.
A new proposal for an Agent Core is currently in preparation and expected to be released before DC-2003. A face-to-face meeting of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
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". A major activity at the moment is the discussion of the proposed Abstract Model. Two face-to-face meetings of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
The Working Group has accumulated a list of bibliographic citation styles in general use. This list will be maintained as a working group resource. It was decided not to recommend any particular style as an encoding scheme, as such recommendations are probably beyond the scope of DCMI.
A proposal for DCMICite, a bibliographic citation Dublin Core structured value (DCSV) encoding scheme for dcterms:bibliographicCitation, has been developed. This proposal has been submitted to the DCMI Usage Board for review at their September 2003 meeting.
Progress on the Guidelines for Encoding OpenURLs for Bibliographic Citation Information in DC Metadata has been slower than anticipated as this work had to wait for completion of the OpenURL specification, but also due to shortage of human resources.
In September 2002, the co-chairs reported that there had been limited interest in the development of a Dublin Core-based application profile for collection-level description. Early in 2003, a number of expressions of interest in the work of the group were received, which led to a re-launch of the group in May 2003.
The previous proposal (based on the RSLP Collection Description schema) was redrafted in the form of an application profile, and that document has formed the basis for discussion via the dc-collections mailing list from June to August 2003. A number of changes were suggested and a third draft is now under discussion. This includes a simple type vocabulary for collections, based on the DCMI Type Vocabulary. A face-to-face meeting of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
After an initial meeting of interested people, the DCMI Corporate Interest Group was set up under the name "Global Corporate Circle". A mailing list is being used to discuss issues of common interest. The group will hold a self-funded workshop on "Metadata and Search" on Sunday, September 28, 2003 in Seattle, with presentations by experts, implementation case studies from DC-Corporate community, demonstrations by search technology vendors, and several Q&A sessions. A self-funded publication is planned to be developed from the workshop that will be used to promote the DCMI and the Corporate Circle. There will also be a meeting of the Interest Group at DC-2003.
The DCMI Environment Interest Group continues its work as a forum for individuals and organizations involved in implementing Dublin Core in the environmental domain. The survey on usage of Dublin Core in the environmental domain was updated. A meeting of the Interest Group will take place at DC-2003.
The work set out in Florence was focused on two areas: (1) continuing work in developing a means for metadata developers in the domain of education to utilize existing metadata standards as reflected in the IEEE LOM and the DCMES; and (2) to continue developing a methodology for establishing domain-specific, high-level vocabularies for use with the 'audience' and 'type' elements. A task force was established to work on each of these two areas. Following are brief statements of accomplishments for each of the task forces.
The Vocabulary Encoding Schemes Task Force completed work begun last year in developing a domain-specific, high-level vocabulary encoding schemes for 'audience' and 'type' elements. The Task Force examined existing encoding schemes using card sorts and clustering analysis to derived high-level named categories that can form the basis for proposed vocabularies.
The Application Profile Task Force set as its goal pursuing the completion of the agenda outlined in the Ottawa Communiqué to develop a machine readable compound schema wedding both DCMI and IEEE LTSC LOM metadata. Communications among participants in the various standards communities interested in advancing this work has been ongoing. An ad hoc task force was formed from among these participants to establish a work agenda to advance the goal set out for the Task Force. The result of those communications is the co-location of meetings of IEEE LTSC and DCMI at DC-2003 in Seattle and the formation of individuals and groups charged with advancing the mutual interests of the participants.
A face-to-face meeting of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
In September 2002, the Government of Canada (Treasury Board Secretariat) solicited examples of training plans, courses and other associated metadata training documentation in either English or French via DC General. The response was excellent, particularly from other governments. In response to Thom Pick's suggestion and agreement at DC2002, we prepared a Web page with links and some original documents. This was made available on the DCMI Web Site on 31 October 2002 (included on the Metadata Training Resources page).
In the spring of 2003, a survey was published regarding government implementation of Dublin Core. Objectives of the survey were to investigate the use of DC in government settings, to identify usage and implementation of DC elements and extensions, to identify key challenges in implementation, and to provide recommendations for future action based on these findings and discussions. It was conducted in the DC GOV community and information was collected from other sources - especially from the European Community.
The other items on the workplan will be discussed at the breakout session of this group at DC-2003.
Discussion of portions of the DC-Lib Application Profile have taken place in the Usage Board meetings in Florence and Ithaca. An RDF markup of the MARC relator terms/codes will be available shortly, which will allow for the use of MARC relators as element refinements for Creator and Contributor. Discussion is almost complete on additional encoding schemes in DC-Lib (to be completed at DC 2003). A face-to-face meeting of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
The group has made contributions to the DCMI registry from the viewpoint of multilinguality. A face-to-face meeting of the Interest Group will take place at DC-2003.
The Registry Working Group has implemented an application interface to the registry using Axis, a Web services approach based on SOAP. WSIL documents were implemented for service discovery. The group implemented an administrative component to facilitate registry management and inter-registry cooperation.
Distributed registries were installed in Japan, Germany and England. This was not in the plan for this year, but the evolution of the registry to a distributed architecture has been a long-term goal of the Working Group.
Work has begun on an installation and usage guide. A face-to-face meeting of the Working Group will take place at DC-2003.
This Interest Group has continued to be a forum for individuals involved in various standardization efforts to keep in touch with each other and to monitor the progress of the Dublin Core as it makes its way through the different standards processes. A main achievement in the area of standardization was the approval by ISO of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set as ISO 15836-2003. Publication of the ISO standard is expected in Autumn 2003.
The Working Group developed proposals for two additions to the DCMI Type Vocabulary, Moving Image and Still Image, an activity led by Simon Pockley of ACMI. These proposals were developed within workplan timescale, and approved by the DCMI Usage Board in its meeting in June 2003.
New versions were produced of "Using Dublin Core", the DCMI Glossary and DCMI Bibliography. These were published on the DCMI Web site in September 2003.
DC-2003 will be held in Seattle WA, USA, from 28 September to 2 October 2003. All information about this event, including the agenda and links to the papers, is available at the conference Web site.
The IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) will be holding plenary and working group meetings in Seattle in conjunction with the DC-2003 conference. This co-location will encourage the continued exchange of ideas and joint work. Further details concerning the LTSC meetings will be made available at http://ltsc.ieee.org/ and linked from the conference Web site. A joint meeting between DCMI and LTSC with representatives from other activities concerned with educational metadata will take place on Thursday 2 October 2003.
In September 2003, the total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working and Interest groups was 3,110, an increase of 7% compared to a year ago. The general mailing list DC-General had 962 subscribers, an increase of 10% in a year. The five largest working and interests groups were: DCMI Libraries (378 subscribers), DCMI Education (301), DCMI Government (197), DCMI Architecture (140) and DCMI Environment (132).
The number of visitors to the DCMI Web site has gone up from an average of around 30,000 per month in the second half year of 2002 to an average of around 40,000 per month in the first half year of 2003. The number of visits doubled, from an average of around 100,000 per month in the second half year of 2002 to a current average of just over 200,000 per month.
On the initiative of Eva Méndez at the University Institute of Information Science and Information Management "Agustín Millares" of the Carlos III University in Madrid, a Spanish mirror of the DCMI Web site became available in June 2003. This is the third mirror of the DCMI Web site, in addition to the mirrors in the UK, hosted by UKOLN and Australia, hosted by the National Library of Australia.
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