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Makx Dekkers/2004-09-20
A sad event marked the period covered by this report. With great sadness we learned that Roland Schwänzl, member of the DCMI Usage Board and Advisory Board and chair of the Tools Working Group, passed away on 29 July 2004. We will all miss Roland's dedication and insight that marked his participation over the years. Stu Weibel posted a message of personal remembrance to DC-General on 2 August 2004.
In August, the DCMI By-laws were published. These By-laws define all roles, responsibilities and procedures involved in the governance of DCMI and, as such, serve as a basic description of the organization and its operational structure..
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 17 May 2004 in New York City, USA. The Board discussed issues related to the Affiliate and Sponsorship programs, liaisons and co-operation arrangements and preparations for DC-2004. The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 9 October 2004 in Shanghai, in conjunction with DC-2004. As a result of the UK becoming a DCMI Affiliate (see below), a new member of the Board of Trustees has been appointed in the person of Paul Miller, the Director of the UK's Common Information Environment.
After its meeting on 14 and 15 March in Bath, UK, the DCMI Usage Board has been preparing the documentation related to the decisions that were taken at that meeting, specifically on the proposals from the Collection Description Working Group and a proposal for Rights related terms. The Usage Board will meet again on 9 and 10 October in Shanghai in conjunction with DC-2004.
The DCMI Advisory Board is scheduled to meet in Shanghai in conjunction with DC-2004, on 15 October 2004 and discuss progress of DCMI since the Seattle conference and the work plan for 2004-2005.
In August 2004, the UK joined the DCMI Affiliate program in a joint initiative from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). See also the MLA/JISC press release and the DCMI news item. The DCMI Affiliate program is intended to provide a stronger link between local communities of practice and the Initiative. Affiliates will help support the infrastructure and management of DCMI, and in return, will assume a growing governance role in the Initiative. The UK is the second Affiliate after the National Library of Finland joined the program in 2003.
Further development of the DCMI Abstract model has continued. A new version of this document will be discussed in the workshop track at DC-2004.
Following the new RDF specifications that were published byW3C earlier in 2004, we need to consider reviewing and possibly revising "Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in RDF / XML".
Work on Dublin Core related specification is well underway in the CEN/ISSS Workshop on Dublin Core metadata. Several documents are out for public comment in July-October 2004.
The AccessForAll information model has been considered in a number of forums and implemented to show how systems can respond to the needs and preferences of users and provide them with resources they can access. This work has reached its final form and is available as a public specification on the IMS Global Learning Consortium's Web site.
The AccessForAll information model provides a way of describing resources (and users) that has been recommended as the base for a new Dublin Core term Accessibility. Documents, models etc have been prepared for presentation to the DC community and recommendation to the DC Usage Board in October 2004.
All the work was undertaken in collaboration with other accessibility communities. In particular, the DC Accessibility Working Group worked collaboratively with the IMS Global Learning Consortium. In addition, the DC Accessibility Working Group participated in work being undertaken in Europe as part of the CEN Dublin Core Workshop and participated in an open workshop in Brussels in April 2004 and one in Copenhagen in July 2004. There was a F2F meeting in November 2003 and six more in 2004.
In 2003-2004, the Agents group worked in four different areas, with limited progress in two areas. The DCMI Architecture working group reported in with examples of how the notion of "related descriptions" from the Dublin Core Abstract Model could be applied to Dublin Core "agents". A draft of Functional Requirements for Describing Agents was prepared and circulated, and a number of institutions returned substantive comments to be folded into the next draft.
The Functional Requirements document has not evolved enough to permit progress in two parts of the working group's charter. It is premature to identify and evaluate existing conventions for agent description against the functional requirements. As a result, it is also too early to develop a recommendation for an agent element set. The delays are attributed to a combination of factors: this year the working group's primary chair resigned and the occupational responsibilities of the individuals tasked with work items have shifted.
Progress could be improved next year by encouraging the release of a new draft requirements document that incorporates the high quality feedback obtained thus far. It may also be productive to try to recruit new chairs whose working responsibilities are more congruent with the group's charge than those of the present chairs.
Following two very productive meetings of the Architecture Working Group at DC-2003, significant progress was made with the Dublin Core Abstract Model,
resulting in the current version of the working draft
(dated 4th Feb 2004).
This draft prompted further discussion on the dc-architecture mailing list. The resulting issues were
summarized in a report to the March
meeting of the Usage Board.
A revised version of the Abstract Model document is currently under development for discussion at DC-2004.
This year's work plan had hoped to see the development of some clarification for RDF
implementers about the 'value as resource' vs. 'value as literal string' issue (discussed at and around DC-2003).
Unfortunately, lack of time has meant that such clarification has not been developed.
More recently, a draft document has been produced suggesting guidance for implementers
about how to assign identifiers to any non-DCMI metadata terms used in their application profiles. Finally, an agenda for the
Working Group meeting at DC-2004 has been drawn up, including discussion about the
Abstract Model and recent W3C developments about how to embed RDF in XHTML. A possible addition to the draft agenda is some discussion about possible
updates to the DCMI Point, Period and Box notes.
The planned deliverable "Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata" is now available as Draft version 1.2.. It was submitted to the Working Group for any further comments and planned finalization before DC-2004. These guidelines will be proposed as a DCMI Recommendation in the next few months. No other work is planned for this Working Group.
The principal item of the work plan was the finalization of the Application Profile for collection-level description, together with supporting materials. This work has attracted significant interest from implementers of the RSLP CD Schema (from the UK and elsewhere) and also from the Metasearch Initiative of the US National Information Standards Organization (NISO). In part as a result of this interest, further revisions to the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile have been made, in particular to increase the specificity of some of the proposed properties, and to select or develop encoding schemes for those properties. The Working Group submitted two proposals for new properties to the meeting of the Usage Board held in March 2004. One of those proposals was accepted; the other was rejected. The Working Group is revising the rejected proposal, and is also preparing several additional proposals for consideration by the Usage Board meeting in October 2004. Work is in progress on the development of usage guidelines, and guidelines on expressing descriptions conforming to the Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile using RDF. A meeting of the Working Group will take place during the DC-2004 conference in Shanghai in October. The main item on the agenda will be to review the Application profile.
The Date Working Group currently has 21 members from at least 5 different countries (Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK and the US) and established a thoughtful work plan which incorporated a variety of issues and questions from interested parties (including the Collection Description and Libraries Working Groups).
The Working Group has made little progress in accomplishing its work plan.
Under leadership of Paula Land, Microsoft, and Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies, the group has worked on the organization of the Pre-Conference Workshop "Metadata for Interoperability in the Global Corporate Environment" at DC-2004 in Shanghai on Sunday 10 October 2004. The group collected best practices, case studies and other materials about the use of DC in the corporate setting and posted requests for case studies and best practices documents to the group's mailing list. Documents submitted for use by the group are published on the Global Corporate Circle web page.
A Working Group meeting is scheduled for DC-2004, to discuss case studies and best practices. The group will continue to solicit documents that can be shared on the Global Corporate Circle Web page. Other topics of interest for case studies might be presentations that have been used within organizations to help promote the use of the Dublin Core in the corporate setting. Furthermore, the group will evaluate the coordination with developers to include Dublin Core metadata software products, and will clarify and review the goals of the Global Corporate Circle as posted on the Web page.
Diane Hillmann replaced Paul Miller as co-chair of the group in 2004.
Cooperative work between DCMI and IEEE LOM has progressed in several ways during this period. One of the deliverables from the ad hoc working groups coming out of the meeting in Seattle was a set of frequently asked metadata questions (FAQ). Through a substantial series of conference calls, considerable progress has been made in identifying the list of initial questions and writing drafts answers. Review of the draft FAQ is on the agenda for the DCMI/IEEE joint working session at DC-2004 in Shanghai. Following the pattern set at DC-2003 in Seattle, the Working Group continues its efforts to mutually support cooperation between the DC-Education Working Group and the work of the IEEE LOM. In this regard, the IEEE LOM will hold two working sessions at DC-2004 in Shanghai in addition to the joint meeting of DCMI/IEEE noted above.
A number of independent efforts have been moving forward the Working Group’s conversation around controlled vocabularies. In the U.S., an NSF/NSDL vocabulary workshop was held in the Washington, D.C. on June 10-11, 2004. The workshop examined a number of extant vocabularies for audience in general, mediator, type and educationLevel. Workshop members, including representatives from various educational metadata projects in the U.S. and Canada, set a prioritized work agenda to develop vocabularies. A report of the workshop will be presented at the Education Working Group session in Shanghai.
We continue to make slow (but steady) progress on the establishment of a projects clearinghouse. A doctoral student at the University of Washington has compiled the results of an initial environmental scan. Discussions are underway for technically implementing the actual clearinghouse.
While not on the Working Group agenda coming out of DC-2003, a draft proposal is currently before the Usage Board for a new DCMI term named “instructionalMethod”.
Except for the update of the Survey on the Usage of Dublin Core in the Environmental Domain, there has not been much activity in the group.
The group will monitor activities elsewhere such as the new initiative on environmental terminology initiated by the European Environment Agency (EEA), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Geological Survey (USGS) called ECOTerm held in the context of the EcoInformatics initiative http://ecoinfo.eionet.eu.int/. There is also the proposal on using Dublin Core metadata for the implementation of the European Union Directive on Free Access to Environmental Information.
The Government Working Group has been fairly quiet this year. Work has continued, as foreshadowed in the work plan, around training in metadata. The other key areas of work have been around service description, where it is intended to circulate a draft guideline for comment before DC-2004, and discussion in Shanghai and in respect of input to the CEN Dublin Core Workshop. Considerable comment has been provided on drafts of new CEN documents. Again, it is intended to have discussion on these draft documents in Shanghai. The previous Government application profile has not been progressed significantly. Rather, the two work streams of services and the CEN documents have been the focus.
In 2003-2004 the Kernel/ERC Working Group addressed its multi-part charter with a proposed six-point work plan. This plan includes official documenting of kernel metadata and its syntax rules, formally defining an ERC-equivalent external format based on XML, creating open-source software to manipulate kernel metadata, and developing best-practices for applying the four kernel elements to different object archetypes.
A draft Kernel Metadata Specification document is available, as well as some production-quality software for rendering records and doing date normalization for the ERC format. Working group members has expressed willingness to conduct a formal evaluation of kernel metadata in a university teaching environment, and to develop software for validation. Another offer to write and test some software conversion routines (from/to an XML format) resulted in the creation and release to the group of a test bed set of 1,600 sample ERC records. A draft of an XML-ERC format is in preparation and due in early September.
There is no progress to report on the creation of application guidelines by area specialists, but this work item came up relatively recently in the working group. It is expected that internationalization will emerge as an important topic in the coming year.
There has been little activity in the Libraries Working Group this year. The planned work centered largely on the Library Application Profile and this is some way behind schedule. The revision of the Application Profile is currently underway. It should be available in its updated and reformatted state before the Shanghai meeting. It should then be available for submission to the Usage Board for approval.
The task to add encoding schemes to the Library Application Profile is on-going, with encoding schemes being proposed as the need arises. This activity is open to anyone who wishes to propose an encoding scheme. There is still some uncertainty about the best procedures for this however.
No progress can be reported on the work on a guidance document for implementers of the Library Application Profile. The task to write an XML schema for the Library Application Profile will start after the next revision of the Application Profile.
The delay in producing the revised Application Profile has had an impact on other tasks in the work plan. The remaining tasks should be re-evaluated in the light of available effort and new volunteers sought. There is no intention to revise the Working Group's Charter this year as it was reviewed and amended last year.
There is to be a joint session with IFLA at DC-2004. This activity is to be welcomed: it is seen as meeting one of the objectives of the Charter in respect of other bibliographic bodies and can be used to encourage active participation in the outstanding work of the group.
Karen Rollitt (National Library of New Zealand) replaced Olga Barysheva (National Library of Russia) as co-chair.
The DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group decided, after the publication of ISO 15836:2003: Information and documentation - The Dublin Core metadata element set, that it was time to update the survey questionnaire of 2002. The 2002 survey questionnaire received replies from nine countries: Japan, Canada, France, Russia, France, India, Sweden, China and Taiwan, and Germany. The 2004 survey questionnaire has so far received a response from seven countries, including Japan, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Finland. Most either have published ISO 15836: 2003 as their country's national standard or are in the process of doing so. All seven countries have translated the elements of Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1 Reference Description and five of the seven have translated Qualifiers. The Dublin Core is used in many domains including libraries, culture and memory organizations, health, education, government, and geographic domains. Diane Hillman’s Using Dublin Core has been translated into French. The DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group will continue to request replies to the survey questionnaire from the Working Group members and provide a report to DC-2004.
The Working Group provided input to a meeting organized by SWAD-Europe and the CEN Dublin Core Workshop on multilingual issues, held 15 and 16 July 2004 in Copenhagen. It submitted information about the DCMI Localization and Internationalization Group and a summary of activity for 2002-2004.
The Preservation Working Group seems to have achieved nothing since DC-2003. The draft charter was sent to the mailing list and is on the Web site but comments on the charter to date have been few. The charter will be finalized at DC-2004, but it is hoped that first other Working Group members will give some more positive feedback at the meeting . The scope of this group needs to be properly defined within the DCMI context.
The working group activity has focused on the following during the past year:
There are no outstanding issues.
The working group activity will focus on the following for the next year:
The role of DCMI as the official ISO Maintenance Agency for ISO 15836:2003 The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has been discussed with the Secretariat of ISO TC46/SC4. One important aspect of Maintenance Agency responsibilities is to promote the Dublin Core standard through conferences, presentations, publications and the publication of implementation tools such as guidelines, schemas and specifications. As ISO 15836 is not a complicated standard (describing the basic 15 elements), it was agreed that there is no need for the Maintenance Agency to process defect reports and Approved Amendments.
With respect to the future development of the standard, it was agreed that the five-year review of the ANSI/NISO standard and the ISO standard will be closely coordinated. The ANSI/NISO Z39.85 - Dublin Core Metadata Element Set will go through the NISO five-year review taking into account input from DCMI. On completion of the ANSI/NISO review the required ISO systematic review will be conducted.
A new version of the IETF RFC was submitted in July, to replace RFC 2413 that is based on Dublin Core version 1.0.
At the scheduled meeting of the Working Group at DC-2004, proposals will be discussed in relation to the need for a formal guidance document for refinements and guidelines for Application Profiles.
There has been no activity in the Working Group during this period. No further work is planned.
The Glossary and Bibliography are updated annually on the Web site, unless immediate corrections are necessary. The Working Group will meet at the next conference to discuss possible additions to the User Documentation.
DC-2004, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2004, will be held from 11 through 14 October 2004 at Shanghai Library in China. This event is hosted by Shanghai Library and sponsored by the Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Science and Technology Library of China and DCMI.
The conference theme this year is "Metadata across languages and cultures". More information is available from the Conference Web site.
On 1 September 2004, the total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working Groups was 3,302, an increase of 6% compared to September 2003. The general mailing list DC-General had 987 subscribers, an increase of 3% in a year. The five largest working and interests groups were: DCMI Libraries (355 subscribers), DCMI Education (278), DCMI Government (195), DCMI Architecture (153) and DCMI Environment (142).
The number of unique visitors to the DCMI Web site in the summer of 2004 was around 50,000 per month, accounting for over 90,000 visits per month.
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