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Makx Dekkers/2006-03-13
On the first of January 2006, a revised mission statement and a revised set of by-laws for DCMI came into force. These issues were communicated in a news release in January 2006.
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 11 September 2005 in Madrid. At that meeting, the Board confirmed new members Raju Buddharaju representing the DCMI Affiliate in Singapore, John Roberts representing the New Zealand Affiliate and David Dawson replacing Paul Miller as representative of the UK Affiliate. The Board held two conference calls in November 2005 and February 2006 discussing financial and strategic issues. A main outcome of the meetings was the adoption of the new by-laws and the redefinition of DCMI's mission statement. The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 1 May 2006 in Seattle, USA, hosted by the University of Washington.
The DCMI Usage Board will meet on 29 and 30 April 2006 in Seattle. This will be the first meeting for the new member Joe Tennis of the University of British Columbia, Canada. Issues on the agenda will include review of basic documentation on how to format and review a Dublin Core Application Profile; review of an application profile for Simple Dublin Core; follow-up on the public comment periods for changes to the DCMI Type Vocabulary and editorial revisions to legacy DCSV (“structured value”) specifications; review of editorial changes to definitions, labels, and comments for DCMI metadata terms; a DCMI Documentation Roadmap prepared by the Directorate; and input to the review process for Resource Description and Access (RDA) cataloguing guidelines.
The DCMI Advisory Board, in its meeting on 16 September 2005 in Leganés, confirmed new members Douglas Campbell of the National Library of New Zealand (new co-chair of the Date Working Group), Lourdes Feria Basurto of the University of Colima, Mexico (co-ordinator for DC-2006), Jane Greenberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA (new co-chair of the Tools Working Group) and Joe Tennis of the University of British Columbia, Canada (responsible for the Dublin Core Conference Paper Repository). In December 2005, Jayakumaran of Web Publishing House, Singapore, became a member of the DCMI Advisory Board as new co-chair of the Global Corporate Circle.
Discussions continued with organisations in several countries that are considering to join the DCMI Affiliate Program. We are pleased to announce that the National Library of Korea will become the fifth DCMI Affiliate on the first of April 2006, joining Finland, the UK, Singapore and New Zealand, and further increasing the global reach of the DCMI Affiliate Program.
Two Public Comment procedures have taken place in the last six months:
The XML schemas published on the XML Schemas page were updated in January 2006 to include support for new terms recently approved by the Usage Board.
In September 2005, Joe Tennis, Assistant Professor at The University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, , along with Mark Jordan and Brian Owen of Simon Fraser University Library and Brad Allen at Siderean Software, established the Dublin Core Conference Paper Repository. The repository provides access to the papers and posters delivered at DCMI Conferences in 2002 (Florence), 2003 (Seattle), 2004 (Shanghai) and 2005 (Madrid). Built on open source software (Linux and Apache Tomcat) and displayed through Siderean Software's Seamark faceted navigation, this Repository offers the metadata community a focused and easy access to these papers. In early March 2006, an agreement was signed between the organisations involved to formalize the arrangements.
The slides of the Tutorials that were given at DC-2005 were made available in PDF from the Training section of the DCMI Web site In January 2006.
DCMI issued a Call for Tender in January 2006 for brief texts and presentations explaining the rationale and business case for Dublin Core metadata to non-experts. After evaluating the seven responses in February, The DCMI Directorate decided to award the work to Barbara Gorson, a consultant on information in digital environments. Further subcontracts were awarded to Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation, UK) and Pete Johnston (UKOLN, University of Bath, UK) to revise the “Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML” in order to update their support for the DCMI Abstract Model, and to Mikael Nilsson (Knowmania HB, Sweden) to finalize a revision of guidelines for expressing Dublin Core in RDF which have been developed by the RDF Taskforce of the DCMI Architecture Working Group. Revised versions of the encoding guidelines for XML and RDF are expected to be posted for public comment in the next months.
A small committee of the Working Group has been drafting a new standard for ISO. In the development of this standard, the implementation within the Dublin Core community was a high priority. The proposed standard reached Final Committee Draft (FCD) late in 2005 and has been out for public comment before final voting in early March 2006. Between the first phase of development and the presentation of the FCD version, a lot of work was done on the information model and the proposed vocabularies. It appears that a version of the information model can be drafted that is consistent with the DCMI Abstract Model. Further discussion concerning a new Dublin Core term is ongoing. The objective is that the solution will match the work of the accessibility community as well as the communities involved in Mobile Web and Device-Independent activities.
There has been active participation in the work in face-to-face meetings, (multiple) weekly teleconferences, on the Accessibility wiki and several lists including the DCMI Accessibility Working Group list.
The work activities scheduled for completion in this period were finished, with one exception. The following items were completed:
The activity to revise the functional requirements document was not completed by the due date of 31 January 2006 due to other work pressures.
There was some discussion of the question of the purpose of describing agents on the group's mailing list in October and November 2005. but no postings since then.
Two main activities should be completed in the period leading up to DC-2006. The revision of the functional requirements document should be completed by the end of February or early March 2006. The second activity is the drafting of an Application Profile for describing agents as ‘related descriptions’. The group anticipates that this will be completed in time for submission to the DCMI Usage Board meeting at DC-2006.
The workplan of the group is as follows:
The first two work items above are being undertaken by the DCMI RDF Taskforce. Unfortunately, there has been no real progress in this taskforce since the Madrid meeting. Recently, DCMI have agreed to fund Mikael Nilsson to undertake some of the document preparation activities on behalf of (and working with) the taskforce.
Pete Johnston has been working on the two work items associated with the XML encoding guidelines. New non-date-stamped URIs for the most recent versions of the XML schemas are in place and are in the final stages of being tested. These will be announced shortly. DCMI have also agreed to fund Pete Johnston and Andy Powell to work on a revised version of the “Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML”, in order that it can provide full support for all aspects of the DCMI Abstract Model.
A revised Draft DCMI Namespace Policy was drafted before the Madrid meeting. However, there has been no progress on this document since then.
Work on the final four work items (GRDDL, RDF in XHTML, Dublin Core Application Profile model, and Box/Period/Point) has not yet started.
By the October 2006 meetings, the XML Schema URIs will have been fully tested, a revised version of the “Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML” will have been finalised and the documents and issues associated with the DCMI RDF Taskforce will have been significantly progressed. A revised DCMI Namespace policy should also be in place.
It is also worth noting that Pete Johnston has developed a syntax-neutral text-based way of representing Dublin Core description sets that conform to the DCMI Abstract Model as part of the ongoing DCMI/IEEE LTSC Joint Taskforce. This way of writing down description sets is particularly useful for aiding mailing list discussions. It is currently being used to support discussions by the DCMI Usage Board, the Accessibility Working Group and the DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce. The document describing this representation will be shared, for comment, with the Architecture Working Group with a view to it becoming a DCMI Recommendation or a DCMI Recommended Resource.
The Working Group decided to assemble a list of related standards, including ‘de facto’ standards, as a working group resource. There are different standards in use by different communities or for different purposes, some informing others, so a list of these would be a useful reference. The draft page (http://epub.mimas.ac.uk/DC/citstds.html) was started by the Working Group chair and has been augmented by suggestions from several Working Group members.
Finalisation of the list of related standards is planned for the end of March 2006. Later inclusion of appropriate additions will be possible.
There is an outstanding item on the work plan, to write “Guidelines for the Encoding of Bibliographic Citations”. This is waiting on a revision to the Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML.
The principal item of the workplan agreed in Madrid is the finalisation of the Application Profile for collection-level description. Four principal outstanding issues were identified; work is in progress on two of these.
A revised draft of the DCMI Collection Description Application Profile has been circulated. This draft addresses two changes requested by the DCMI Usage Board after their preliminary review of the Application Profile:
The representation of Item Format has not yet been discussed.
An extension to the Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues has been developed by Michael Heaney of the University of Oxford, with the aim of clarifying some of the issues surrounding the differences between the Location of a Collection and the Service which makes a Collection available. The issue is currently under discussion via the mailing list, and opinion seems to be in favour of retaining both the isLocatedAt and isAccessedVia properties.
Further work on Encoding Scheme(s) for Open-Ended Date Ranges depends on work by the DCMI Date Working Group.
Progress is now running slightly behind the schedule described in the Workplan. A proposal to address the issue concerning the representation of Item Format will be made during March 2006 by the Working Group chair.
At the DC-2005 conference, Douglas Campbell (National Library of New Zealand) was appointed co-chair of the Working Group. The group established a workplan for 2005-2006 that provides for work on various categories of dates in two phases. The initial phase gives priority to categories of dates sought by other DCMI Working Groups. A draft encoding standard, “Date and Time Short Form”, has been prepared by Charles McCathieNevile and is under review.
The Working Group will focus on completing its workplan. No face-to-face meetings prior to the DC-2006 conference are currently planned.
The major focus of the workplan for 2005-2006 of the Working Group is on the development of the DCMI Education Application Profile. Work on the Application Profile has two intertwined components:
Work on the first component is underway through the Application Profile Drafting Committee and work on the second through the Joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce. The work of these two bodies is inextricable intertwined. The need to integrate select IEEE/LOM elements into the DCMI Education Application Profile was identified as early as 2000 at the DCMI Education Working Group meeting in Australia. However, the technical means for doing so remained illusive until the emergence of the DCMI Abstract Model. Thus, upon the completion of the Taskforce work, the Drafting Committee will integrate select IEEE/LOM properties into the emerging Application Profile.
The work of the Drafting Committee is progressing — albeit slowly. Stemming from discussions at the face-to-face meeting at DC-2005 in Madrid, the Drafting Committee has narrowed its focus to those properties most relevant to the education/training domain: type, audience, educationalLevel, instructionalMethod and mediator. Discussions are ongoing on the Drafting Committee list of the audience property. The new DCMI Education wiki is being used successfully as the Drafting Committee's collaborative work space. The target is to complete, at a minimum, these education properties for discussion at DC-2006 and to submit a proposal for consideration by the DCMI Usage Board at its mid-term meeting in early 2007.
The joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC Taskforce held three conference calls. A first analysis of a mapping from IEEE/LOM to the DCMI Abstract Model was finished and agreed, resolving the main modelling issues. Work started on a draft document and examples.
In the next months, more conference calls are foreseen to resolve further issues. The Taskforce aims to have a draft document before DC-2006 in October 2006, including a set of examples and introductory material. Around the same time, the group hopes to submit the documents to both DCMI and IEEE LTSC for formal endorsement.
The Environment Working Group is continuing its activities according to the charter. Membership has been constant. No documents were published since DC-2005 in Madrid.
Activities for 2006 include the update of the state of the art report and a review of the charter and workplan.
In December 2005, Jayakumaran (Melvin Jay Kumar) of Web Publishing House in Singapore was appointed co-chair of the group.
Information developed by the Corporate Circle was posted to the group's Web page (bibliography, case studies, reports, presentation).
Work has started to rework the Web pages to better support the group's needs. A small committee has been working to redesign the pages. Alex Massytchev has completed a design and coded the first level of pages. The following steps are a wider review of the design and tests for browser compatibility and accessibility.
Continuation of the work item to build a body of case studies of how Dublin Core and other metadata have been implemented in a corporate environment has been put on hold until to work commissioned by DCMI is complete, as there may be some overlap.
A sub-committee to identify and evaluate an application profile is headed by Melvin Jay Kumar. He is in the process of identifying an appropriate project and application profile that can be used and published as an example on a public Web site.
Duane McCollum has taken on responsibility to chair a sub-committee to prepare a workshop at DC-2006. He plans to ask the DCMI list for help and volunteers to help plan and execute the workshop in Colima.
The work with the DCMI Government Application Profile has started within the editorial group, i.e. the editor has drafted a roadmap and workplan. This draft plan will be presented to the Working Group when the editorial group has finished it and will later be published at the group's Web page.
Due to lack of time the work item concerning controlled vocabularies has not started yet, and may be further postponed. Other work items progress as planned.
The Working Group expects that both the Application Profile and the final result of “Service description” will be presented at DC-2006 in October 2006.
There has been no activity since the Madrid conference.
The workplan for 2005-2006 includes writing a Kernel Application Profile that defines:
Three activities arose from the meetings at Madrid:
Information relating to the RDA work in points 2 and 3 can be found at http://dublincore.org/groups/libraries/rda/.
It was felt that it would be easier to assess the applicability of RDA to Dublin Core if there were a statement of requirements for content level rules from DCMI. This specification, based on a broader set of principles, is currently in the planning stages and further details will be provided shortly. It has been proposed that a special RDA session could be held at DC-2006.
This Working Group held a special session at DC-2005 in Madrid, Spain. 13 participants attended the special session from 9 countries.
The session included a presentation from Tom Baker, in his role as DCMI Director of Specifications and Documentation, on the issues arising for translations of DCMI terms.
The group will work on ways that valid and certified translations of DCMI terms could be identified.
The second part of the session included presentations from some of the Working Group members, including Dublin Core metadata developments in South Africa, Japan, Thailand, New Zealand, and Taiwan. There were also two presentations on multilingual issues.
The Working Group would like to work toward publishing the papers for these presentations in a special issue of a journal. However, so far not enough written papers have been received. The chairs will work toward uploading the presentations to the group's Web page.
Shigeo Sugimoto, co-chair of this Working Group, presented at the International Workshop on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, held at the 8th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, 12-15 December 2005, Bangkok, Thailand. The Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand and University of Tsukuba, Japan sponsored this in cooperation with the DCMI. The workshop collected 60 participants from about 10 countries and regions.
This Working Group 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
This Working group was deactivated at the DCMI Advisory Board meeting in September 2005, in accordance with DCMI policy of annual renewal of Working Groups.
There has been no activity since the Madrid conference.
The workplan for 2005-2006 includes the following new items.
Activity within the Registry Working Group has focused on exchange of information and experience amongst the various registry initiatives identified at DC-2005. The NSDL Registry project has established a Registry blog and a project wiki, providing additional channels for communication.
Both the NSDL Registry project and the JISC IE Schema Registry project have been working on developing scenarios and use cases to cover the various requirements of registry stakeholders. The JISC registry scenarios will be made available so there is potential for some work across these projects on analysis of requirements.
Members of the Woking Group met in January 2006 at the British Library with representatives of The European Library (TEL) service, a collaboration between European national libraries supported by the European Commission. Discussions have centred on possibilities for setting up a more structured metadata registry to disclose the TEL Application profile, and in the longer term to register relevant crosswalks.
Rachel Heery, the Working Group's chair phoned into the eXtended Metadata Registry (XMDR) Project Quarterly meeting, 18-20 October 2005, to give an overview of registry activity related to Dublin Core and to consider possible interaction between the groups. The XMDR project is helping to develop Edition 3 of ISO 11179 Parts 2 & 3. Collaboration was discussed around sharing of use cases and registry content (metadata schemas) which might be registered in the XMDR prototype. This collaboration can be taken forward now registry projects have moved forward on their use cases.
A call has been sent out for contributions to guidelines for national standardization. Up to now a single contribution from one country was received and more are needed. The chair will follow up on the call to try to get the needed contributions.
The list of tools on the DCMI Web is being updated. It is generated from a database to make maintenance easier. The structure of the database and Web site are still under discussion in the group, because this is an experimental implementation of metadata used for the description of tools http://dublincore.org/tools/.
Several members of the Working Group met in November 2005 to continue the work on an Application Profile for software, tools and algorithms. Results were discussed with some members informally at a workshop held in Osnabrück on 24 November 2005.
A proposal for a Workshop on “Metadata Tools for Digital Resource Repositories”, submitted by the chairs of the DCMI Tools Working Group, has been accepted for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The workshop will include presentations by selected tool developers, an exhibition by application developers via a current open call, and a breakout session to discuss needs of tool developers and users. JCDL will be held in Chapel Hill (NC, USA), 11-15 June 2006. (See: http://ils.unc.edu/mrc/news.html for links to workshop information).
Publication on the DCMI Tools Working Group list of a first version of the DCMI Tools Application Profile and a report on its implementation is planned for June 2006.
This Working Group was deactivated at the DCMI Advisory Board meeting in September 2005. The editors (Mary Woodley of California State University Northridge, Diane Hillmann of Cornell University Library, and Corey Harper of University of Oregon Libraries) of the documentation that was produced under the group's charter (Using Dublin Core, the DCMI Glossary and the DCMI Bibliography) will work with Tom Baker, the DCMI Director of Specifications and Documentation, to maintain and further develop this set of documents.
There has been no activity in the joint ODRL/DCMI Profile Working Group during this period. No messages have been sent to the mailing list and no documents have been produced. As a result of this lack of progress, the Working Group chairs (Renato Iannella and Andy Powell) propose to revise the aim of the Working Group. The intention is that a document will be produced that describes how to link from DCMI metadata descriptions to ODRL DRM expressions. When finalised, this document should become a DCMI Recommended Resource.
The document above will be authored by Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation). A first draft will be produced during March 2006.
DC-2005, held from 12 through 15 September 2005 in Leganés (Madrid) was attended by 214 attendees from 33 countries. Participants were enthusiastic about the facilities provided by the University of Carlos III and the programme, including four keynotes, five tutorials, fourteen long papers, eighteen short papers, fourteen Working Group meetings and ten Special Sessions. More information is available on the conference Web site. The papers are available in the Dublin Core Conference Paper Repository, while the Tutorials are available from the Training section of the DCMI Web site.
DC-2006, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2006, will be held from 3 through 6 October in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico, hosted by the Department Coordinación General de Servicios y Tecnologías de Información (CGSTI) of the University of Colima. A multimedia presentation is available with information about the University of Colima and the venue for the conference.
Javier Solorio Lagunas of the University of Colima and Thomas Baker of DCMI have been appointed Program Chairs, while Lourdes Feria Basurto of the University of Colima and Makx Dekkers of DCMI have taken on responsibility as co-ordinators of the event.
The conference Web site is located at http://dc2006.ucol.mx and the Call for Papers is open until 15 April 2006.
At the end of February 2006, the general mailing list DC-General had 958 subscribers, an increase of 10 compared to September 2005. The total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working Groups (not counting DC-General) increased from 2,127 to 2,202 in the same period, an increase of 75. The largest Working Groups are: DCMI Libraries (353 subscribers), DCMI Education (275), DCMI Government (181), DCMI Architecture (152) and DCMI Collection Description (143).
The Web site statistics show that the average number of unique visitors to the DCMI Web site is now 73,000 per month (March 2005-February 2006), up from 62,000 for March 2004-February 2005. Compared to that period, the average number of visits to the Web site per month increased from 111,000 year to 143,000 per month in the last twelve months.
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