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Makx Dekkers/2005-09-05
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 3 and 4 April 2005 in Seeheim, near Frankfurt in Germany, to discuss future strategies and priorities. The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 11 September 2005 in Madrid.
The DCMI Usage Board met at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, USA, on 19 and 20 May 2005. Following that meeting, the Usage Board announced the creation of several new terms — an encoding scheme for National Library of Medicine Classification; Instructional Method; and three elements related to the method, policy, and periodicity of collection accrual (see the Usage Board decisions page). The next Usage Board meeting will take place in Madrid on 9 and 10 September 2005.
Two new Affiliates have joined the DCMI Affiliate Program. The National Library Board Singapore joined in June 2005, while a group of public agencies in New Zealand (Archives New Zealand, National Library of New Zealand and the State Services Commission) signed up in July 2005. Together with the Affiliates in Finland (since 2003) and the UK (since 2004), the Affiliate Program now spans across the globe, underlining the global reach and objectives of DCMI.
The document entitled Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata was available for Public Comment from 18 April until 18 May 2005. After this period, the document was published as a DCMI Recommendation.
The document entitled Element Refinement in Dublin Core Metadata was available for Public Comment from 18 April until 18 May 2005. After this period, the document was published as a DCMI Recommended Resource.
In August 2005, revised versions of four existing DCMI recommendations were out for public comment: Dublin Core Structured Values, the DCMI Box Encoding Scheme, the DCMI Period Encoding Scheme, and the DCMI Point Encoding Scheme. After resolution of comments, these new versions will be officially published.
Working Group members had face-to-face meetings in Sheffield, UK, in November 2004 and April 2005; in Toronto, Canada, in May 2005 and July 2005. Teleconferences were held on a weekly basis.
The main work of the Working Group has been to collaboratively develop specifications for AccessForAll profiles for users and resources, and to work through the adoption processes of IMS Global Learning Consortium, DCMI and ISO JTC1 SC36. There are proposals before the DCMI Usage Board, the ISO JTC1 SC36 national bodies for comment, and the first version of the specifications has been adopted by the IMS Consortium.
The group is currently revising its charter and proposes to work on a new term dc:adaptability. Adoption of a suitable new term remains a high priority for the Working Group.
The co-chairs of the Working Group found it increasingly difficult to devote sufficient time to running the Agents Working Group during 2004 and early 2005. Consequently, John Kunze and Stu Weibel stood aside as co-chairs of the Agents WG. In March 2005, they were replaced by two new co-chairs, John Roberts, Archives New Zealand, and Andrew Wilson, Arts and Humanities Data Service.
Open issues are:
The group's work plan for 2004-2005 included the following items:
Item 1 was completed in March 2005. See: http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/
Item 2 hasn't been started.
Invites have been sent to the taskforce members required for item 3, but no other progress has been made.
A suggested way forward for item 4 was made to the DC-Architecture list by Pete Johnston. In the absence of any negative comments, the plan is to implement this proposal prior to the Madrid conference.
Some thought has been given to how we progress item 5, though there is no public discussion document as yet. There are some issues with how we move this item forward (see below).
There has been no progress on item 6.
There have also been a number of significant discussions on the working group mailing list during the year, notably about the nature of ‘description sets’ in the Abstract Model and about the possibility of mixing and matching RDF properties and XML elements. Much of this kind of discussion has overlapped significantly with the work of the Usage Board. This has resulted in the development of a number of documents, including:
While there are no specific issues with the revisions to the Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML suggested in work item 5, there are issues with the instantiation of other features of the DCMI Abstract Model in XML, particularly the handling of ‘value URIs’, ‘encoding schemes’ and ‘related descriptions’. These issues will need careful handling, especially as backwards compatibility with the current XML encoding guidelines is seen as important.
Two new issues have also been raised during the year. Firstly, the relationship of DCMI's HTML encoding guidelines with the ongoing work of the W3C to develop simpler mechanisms for embedding RDF into XHTML. Secondly, the need for DCMI to consider whether the use of GRDDL should be actively encouraged as a mechanism for translating arbitrary DC/XML into RDF/XML.
Finally, it is worth noting that Mikael Nilsson has suggested using the DCMI Abstract Model as a mechanism for aligning the IEEE LOM with DC. While this work is likely to be undertaken largely through the DC Education working group, it builds on work done previously by the Architecture working group.
The document ‘Guidelines for Encoding Bibliographic Citation Information in Dublin Core Metadata’ was published as a DCMI Recommendation in June 2005. Prior to this, the document was revised, also incorporating comments from interested parties outside the Working Group. Recommendations for XML encoding, based on earlier DC-in-XML guidelines, were removed from the document because they are now inconsistent with the DCMI Abstract Model. Further changes to the document were made to clarify its consistency with the Abstract Model during the Advisory Board comment period.
In April 2005, the OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services was endorsed as a standard, Z39.88-2004, by NISO members and approved by ANSI, which means that the DCMI Citation Guidelines document references an official standard for its recommendations. Publication of these guidelines as a DCMI recommendation was disseminated to several e-mail lists including the OpenURL and OAI communities.
The Working Group plan to write a further document ‘Guidelines for the Dublin Core in XML Encoding of Bibliographic Citations’. This will be an addition to the recently published DCMI Recommendation, and will provide recommendations and examples for an XML encoding. A revision to the Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML, consistent with the Abstract Model, is awaited before this work starts.
The principal item of the 2004-2005 work plan is the finalisation of the Application Profile for collection-level description (DC CD AP), together with supporting materials.
The Working Group has reviewed the collection type vocabulary and added some new terms ( CLDType). The current set of terms may be revised again in the light of discussions about how to represent information about the format of items within the collection.
The WG has discussed the question of how to represent the fact a collection contains items of specified formats. At present, those discussions are ongoing.
A Wiki has been used to allow Working Group participants to contribute examples of the use of the DC CD AP to describe collections
The DCMI Usage Board has suggested that the DC CD AP should be the subject of a “partial review” by the UB at its meeting in Madrid in September 2005. The Working Group aims to produce an updated version for this purpose during August 2005. That version will probably not reflect solutions to all the outstanding issues (see “Open Issues” below), but the review will provide some feedback on the DC CD AP, particularly regarding the extent to which it reflects the DCMI Abstract Model and UB requirements for the documentation and presentation of Dublin Core Application Profiles.
Open issues are:
Work has begun on Usage Guidelines for the DC CD AP, though it will not be possible to finalise these until the DC CD AP itself is stable.
Within NISO MI Task Group 2, some initial work has been done on mapping between other metadata standards used for collection-level description and the version of the DC CD AP adopted by that group.
The chair of the Working Group has presented information about the DC CD AP to a workshop organised by the JISC IESR project in London in January; to the NISO Metasearch Initiative meeting in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina in March 2005 (NISO MI Task Group 2 is proposing to adopt a slightly modified version of the DC CD AP for its collection description requirements); and to a workshop on Distributed Service Registries organised by JISC and UKOLN in Warwick, UK, in July 2005.
The posting of minutes from the Shanghai conference meeting of the Date Working Group, and agreement and posting of a 2004-2005 work plan were completed shortly after the DC-2004 conference in Shanghai.
Updates to the Working Group home page have been made, including the addition/updating of various useful links to date-related standards (including notably TEMPER (TEMPoral Enumerated Ranges) (Internet-Draft) which has been authored by the Working Group member John Kunze)
Progress on the 2004-2005 includes chiefly work on 2 of 4 work items. The WG has acted on two items referred to it by the Usage Board, namely:
The WG has begun work on identifying/defining profiles and/or schema that will satisfy unmet date schema needs in the Dublin Core community.
The DC-Education working group has made substantial progress in the development of the DC-Ed Draft Application Profile in anticipation of discussions of the Draft in Madrid. A Drafting Committee has been formed and is made up of the following members:
The Working Pages for the Drafting Committee can be found at: http://dublincore.org/educationwiki/DC_2dEducation_20Application_20Profile.
The Committee has divided up the preliminary discussion and development of individual properties among sub-committees. That work is being reported back through the wiki for wider discussion by the full Drafting Committee. Substantial time has been reserved for face-to-face discussions in Madrid. The Committee's work is being advanced through conference calls and the wiki.
The Global Corporate Circle (GGC) has activated a wiki and has posted a bibliography of resources relevant to metadata in a corporate environment. Many thanks to Paula Land and Joseph Busch for their contribution in this effort.
A group discussion regarding the benefit of having a generic presentation covering the Return-on-Investment (ROI) of metadata was held among some of the GCC members, and it was decided that a presentation would be valuable to the members, so that it could be downloaded and customized for various situations in which justification or explanation about the value and ROI of metadata was needed. Joseph Busch supplied a basic presentation, and input from various other people within the GCC was gathered. A draft version was prepared by Todd Stephens and shared with the group for feedback in July 2005.
A proposal has been submitted and accepted to have a panel discussion on Strategic Corporate Information Management sponsored by the DCMI Global Corporate Circle at the upcoming DCMI Conference in Madrid. There will be a number of people who will give presentations followed by a group discussion with attendees regarding a number of issues around Information Management in a corporate setting. Many thanks to the following people for their willingness to help coordinate this event: Arthur Haynes, Ted Kitzmiller, Sarah Rice and Jennifer Kujawa.
There are no open issues — all items on the work plan are currently being addressed.
Since the Shanghai conference the DCMI Government Working Group has changed its charter on the basis of discussions held at the conference. This new charter was endorsed by the Working Group in December 2004.
The general activity of the Working Group is not high. Nevertheless, there has been some discussion on the mailing list in 2004-2005, especially on the subject of a controlled vocabulary for the Audience element. Furthermore, in early 2005, the Working Group re-started the work on a "DC-GOV Application Profile", a final draft of which will be available for discussion at the Working Group's meeting in Madrid in September 2005.
The Working Group will revise its part of the Dublin Core Web site. Deliverables that are no longer relevant will be deleted, after decisions to be taken in Madrid. From the Working Group's latest "Work programme" the following items remain to be addressed:
While there has been little traffic on the discussion list, documentation progressed with the publication of two Internet-Drafts defining two aspects of the ERC syntax substrate for kernel metadata. The first, “A Name-Value Language (ANVL)”, defines the basic ERC record structure minus element semantics. The second, “Temporal Enumerated Ranges (TEMPER)”, defines the ERC date/time format (which has not yet been reviewed by the DC-Date Working Group). These documents permit the ERC specification to be simplified by removing record and date/time syntax details to separate specifications, where they are also available to non-ERC applications.
Efforts of working group members resulted in two open source search engines (Amberfish and Isite2) being adapted to index, search, and transform ERC/Kernel metadata. Links to these engines were added from the Working Group home page, one of which includes a demonstration site and sample Z39.50 server settings.
Some evaluation of Kernel metadata in MLIS graduate student projects was conducted at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and the University of North Texas (UNT). UNC students looked at Kernel metadata in the context of models, architectures, and applications, and UNT students will be making available comparable sets of resource citations marked up in qualified Dublin Core and in ERC.
Documentation progress has been made, but finalizing it is difficult until more feedback has been obtained. Some question has arisen over whether work plan item 2 (defining and implementing a process for anyone to publish new vocabulary terms) shouldn't be removed, as a mechanism already exists in DCMI for proposing new terms. Work item 3 (defining an ERC-equivalent external format based on XML) may also be removed as being beyond the scope of the simple plain text syntax that is one of the core goals of the ERC.
Of the four specific actions agreed in Shanghai, there has been some activity on three. Ann Apps completed a draft XML schema for the DCMI Libraries Application Profile (DC-Lib) in February 2005 which provoked lengthy discussion on both the Library and Architecture lists. The action to revise DC-Lib was discussed but not pursued given the likelihood of a further revision being required after the UB meeting in May 2005. So although the application profile could not be submitted to the UB for registration, the problematic issues were specifically included on their agenda. The issues are the use of Roles from the MARC Relator list and the mismatch between DC elements and XML attributes raised by the inclusion of MODS elements in DC-Lib.
In an interesting development the Working Group was approached by the Outreach Committee of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) to participate in a review of the revised version of Part 1 of AACR. AACR is the major body of rules for the creation of traditional cataloguing records in the English speaking world and it is attempting to reshape itself for the new information environment. Following feedback from many interested bodies, AACR will be more radically revised than was first envisaged and the Working Group has been asked to play a more formal role in this activity. A representative from AACR is attending the meeting in Madrid and a plan will be developed as to how the Working Group can contribute. This activity fulfils one of our Charter objectives.
The work plan item to produce guidance material for the use of DC-Lib is still outstanding. At the Shanghai meeting it was agreed that this would be developed in conjunction with the DC User Documentation Working Group, possibly with volunteers contributing assigned sections. The work has not started and will be addressed at the forthcoming Working Group meeting when volunteers will be sought.
This Working Group has continued its activities through 2005, preparing for the DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group Meeting to be held 13 September 2005 at DC-2005 in Madrid. A Call for Papers was made to potential DC-2005 participants, requesting a short presentation about their local and/or domain specific activities. An invitation was made to also submit a paper for their presentation of approximately 1500 words for publication in the Journal of Internet Cataloging.
The outcome of the 2004 Questionnaire on DCMES : standards - translations - use is now available at the DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group Web page.
This Working Group does not have a formal work plan. It is primarily a forum for individuals and organizations from international communities to share information and knowledge gained from experiences in their local or domain-specific applications of Dublin Core, especially where English is not the primary language.
A revised Working Group charter and a proposed work plan were discussed at the Working Group meeting in Shanghai and posted to the list for comment by the end of 2004, but there was only very little response from the list subscribers. A number of the proposed activities were undertaken:
Items on the proposed work plan which did not get underway are as follows:
It is planned to create a core working group recruited from list subscribers who already have experiences with PREMIS, who are interested in PREMIS or who plan to implement PREMIS.
There were a number of minor enhancements to the DCMI Registry software since Shanghai. These include an improved Greek translation, support for the Maori language and a number of new statistical reporting features.
A new distributed registry was installed at the National Library of New Zealand. This registry provides support for English and Maori.
A new version of the registry has been developed and is available as a prototype and for download. This registry is a ‘light’ version of the existing software and was designed with a focus on easy deployment. It is intended to be installed as a binary, with no (or minimal) installation tasks.
Documentation for the new registry version still needs to be written.
The work plan for 2005 was:
A report evaluating DCMI and MMI-DC documents is under preparation and will be circulated before the Working Group meeting on 12 September 2005 in Madrid.
Input about national standardization of DC has been solicited without much success. The chair will try other routes and report at next Working Group meeting.
The chair compiled and submitted a report related to the role of DCMI as Maintenance Agency for ISO 15836 to ISO TC46/SC4 for the meeting of this committee in October 2004. See: http://www.niso.org/international/SC4/n560.pdf.
A proposed revision of RFC 2413 was submitted to IETF in August 2004. DCMI has responded to several questions from IETF. We are waiting for further action from IETF.
Remaining open issues are:
The Tools working group held a workshop in March 2005 in Göttingen, Germany. The workshop was a brainstorming session that included discussion of available services, tools, and functionalities, and how to support and expand these.
An outline, including use cases, for the development of the Web services framework was discussed in the mailing list. The presentation of a prototype implementation of the framework is scheduled to be presented in Madrid.
It was agreed at the working group meeting in Göttingen, in March 2005, to present a revision of the working group agenda to Working Group members at the Madrid meeting.
The User Guide was updated on 26 May 2005 by Diane Hillmann. New versions of the Glossary and Bibliography were published in early September 2005.
One open issue is the addition of ‘Best practices’ documentation to the User Documentation.
The MMI-DC Workshop finalized a number of Dublin Core-related CEN Workshop Agreements and reports which have been published by CEN:
Co-operation with the IEEE Learning Object Metadata work has continued with the participation of Mikael Nilsson and Ambjörn Næve as co-authors of the DCMI Abstract Model.
A meeting is planned to take place at DC-2005 in Madrid to discuss future joint activities.
In February 2005, a joint Profile Working Group was established between DCMI and the Open Digital Rights Initiative (ODRL) to develop a profile of ODRL/DCMI metadata usage. The profile will show how to make combined use of the rights-related DCMI metadata terms and the ODRL rights expression language. This will enable richer rights management information to be captured along with DCMI descriptive metadata and support wider interoperability with digital rights management and open content licensing systems. This Working Group is chaired by Andy Powell (UKOLN, University of Bath) and Renato Iannella (ODRL Initiative).
Discussions have started with the News Metadata Framework (NMDF) Working Group of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) about liaison between the two organizations.
DC-2005, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2005, will be held from 12 through 15 September at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Leganés (Madrid). The conference theme this year is "Metadata Vocabularies in Practice". More information is available from the Conference Web site.
A proposal has been received from the Department Coordinación General de Servicios y Tecnologías de Información (CGSTI) of the University of Colima in Mexico to host the DCMI conference and workshop in October 2006.
At the end of August 2005, the general mailing list DC-General had 946 subscribers. The total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working Groups (not counting DC-General) was 2233. The largest Working Groups are: DCMI Libraries (343 subscribers), DCMI Education (263), DCMI Government (175), DCMI Architecture (148) and DCMI Collection Description (134).
The average number of unique visitors to the DCMI Web site is now around 65,000 per month, up from the average of around 50,000 per month in 2004. The average number of visits to the Web site per month increased from around 90,000 in 2004 to around 150,000 per month in 2005.
In addition to two mirrors of the DCMI Web site in the UK (hosted by UKOLN) and in Australia (hosted by the National Library of Australia), there are also two sites with a (partial) translation of the DCMI Web site. These are the Spanish site, translated and hosted by the Instituto Agustín Millares de Documentación y Gestión de la Información of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, and the Japanese site, translated and hosted by the School of Library and Information Science, University of Tsukuba.