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Makx Dekkers/2006-09-25
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 1 May 2006 in Seattle. The Board held a further conference call in July 2006. The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 7 October 2006 in Manzanillo, Mexico, the day after DC-2006.
The DCMI Usage Board had their mid-term meeting on 29 and 30 April 2006 in Seattle.
In the last year, the Usage Board has achieved the following:
The following is planned for 2006-2007:
The next meeting of the DCMI Usage Board will take place on 30 September and 1 October 2006 in Manzanillo, Mexico.
The DCMI Advisory Board will meet in Manzanillo, Mexico, on 2 October 2006 to discuss the activities of the DCMI Working Groups and general operational issues.
The National Library of Korea joined the DCMI Affiliate Program on the first of April 2006, joining Finland, the UK, Singapore and New Zealand, and further increasing the global reach of the Program.
Discussions are continuing with organisations in a number of other countries that are considering to join the DCMI Affiliate Program.
Two Public Comment procedures have taken place in the last six months:
In April 2006, revised specifications for DCMI DCSV, DCMI Period, DCMI Point, and DCMI Box superseded older versions as DCMI Recommendations.
In August 2006, the DCMI Usage Board finalized a set of revisions to the DCMI Type Vocabulary. The RDF schema for the DCMI Type Vocabulary and the DCMI Registry were updated accordingly.
The accessibility Working Group has been active in collaboration with the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Working Group in developing a final version of the AccessForAll information models for both the description of users’ needs and preferences and for resource descriptions to be matched to those needs and preferences. This work has taken place simultaneously with the finalization of new accessibility recommendations from W3C, including one that requires accessibility metadata on all resources. Coordination of these activities, and other relevant ISO, EU and IMS activities has made working difficult at times but hopefully will ensure greater interoperability of accessibility metadata. There has been extensive discussion of the new accessibility approach through such channels as the DCMI Accessibility Wiki and e-mail lists but also at a number of conferences where papers have been presented and face-to-face discussions have taken place. The CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM), a US research and development facility dedicated to the issues of media and information technology for people with disabilities, has developed a multimedia presentation to help explain the new specifications and their use.
A major issue is education and outreach about accessibility metadata and the huge difference it can make to most people, and the way in which it can help people who cannot find what they can use on the Web despite having the necessary skills and equipment. It should be noted that while search engines might help with the finding of content by subject, this does not solve accessibility problems.
Some work was done on refining the functional requirements document, although this remains unfinished. Discussions have been held concerning past discussions of the Agents Working Group about agent descriptions and all relevant earlier documents have been collected. There has been some contact concerning the use of specifications developed by the FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) project for agent descriptions.
Open issues include finalizing the update of the functional requirements document and the possible development of an Application Profile for agent descriptions within Dublin Core metadata. This activity may change depending on results of discussions concerning FOAF.
The following progress has been made since the Madrid conference:
Much of the work on the Architecture Working Group work plan at the start of the year remains, though significant progress has been made in some areas. In particular, the following items from the current work plan remain in progress:
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. This list of related standards was finalised on 2006-03-31, as a working group resource.
There is an outstanding item on the work plan, to write “Guidelines for the Dublin Core in XML Encoding of Bibliographic Citations”. This is waiting on a revision to the Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML.
On the issue of representing item format, agreement was reached on the use of a property to represent the media type of items within a collection. As a consequence of this decision some changes were also made to the proposed use of the dc:type property and the Collection Type Vocabulary.
The Working Group is currently preparing the version of the DCMI Collection Description Application Profile (and supporting documents) which will be submitted to the DCMI Usage Board for review at its meeting in Manzanillo at the end of September 2006.
The issues related to the ownership and maintenance responsibility for both the Collection Description Application Profile itself and the new terms that have been created for use in that profile remain to be resolved, but some initial discussions have taken place which indicate that a third party is willing to take on this role, in partnership with DCMI if appropriate.
The Application Profile will be published with a reference to a date syntax encoding scheme for open-ended date ranges that forms part of the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema. If the DCMI Date Working Group develops a suitable syntax encoding scheme in the future, consideration will be given at that time to amending the Application Profile to reference that new scheme.
The Working Group established a Wiki for collaborative drafting of documents. A draft of a W3C note is in preparation to specify a short form date (similar to W3CDTF without punctuation).
Open issues include researching and documenting detailed date requirements and implementing appropriate date encoding schemes.
As decided at DC-2005 in Madrid, the DCMI Education Working Group had two agenda items for 2006:
In July 2006, a working draft of a DCMI Education Application Profile was published to the DCMI Education discussion list for preliminary discussions prior to the Working Group meeting at DC-2006 in Manzanillo. The focus of the draft is on a limited set of education-specific properties and controlled vocabularies. The properties of concern are: Audience, Conforms To, Education Level, Instructional Method, Mediator, Subject, and Type. Since controlled vocabularies for a number of these properties are of necessity jurisdictionally-based, the draft provides a beginning list of potential schemes for select properties.
The Joint DCMI/IEEE Task Force has drafted a representation of the metadata elements of the IEEE Learning Object Metadata Standard in terms of the DCMI Abstract Model. Recent progress in this area is summarized in a presentation by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell at the CETIS Metadata & Digital Repositories SIG.No activities occurred in the last year other than continuation of the mailing list.
Information that was developed in the last year was posted to the group's Web page.
As part of the activity to build a body of case studies of how Dublin Core and other metadata have been implemented in corporate environments, some case studies were posted on the group's Web page. More case studies will be added to the current list.
The group was considering a real-world Application Profile as an example, but unfortunately the development of that Application Profile was stalled and the group could not continue its evaluation. The group is now looking for other examples to consider.
A special session will take place at DC-2006 in Manzanillo with two presentations.
The Government Working Group has continued work on the Application Profile. An editorial group has transformed the draft profile discussed at DC-2005 to a Wiki, were further discussions and editing are taking place; especially by the editorial group. Discussion on the mailing list has been at a minimum because the Wiki — for the last several months — has been the main communication platform.
Two more work item are in progress at the moment, this is “Service description” and “Controlled vocabularies”. The editors will report on status at the DCMI Government Working Group meeting at DC-2006.
While there was little traffic on the mailing list, the group's chair has been working in the background on further documentation. Presentations related to the Kernel work were held at the JCDL Workshop on Metadata Tools for Digital Resource Repositories on 15 June 2006. The workshop presentation described the implementation of Kernel metadata to resource description retrieval. The retrieval method itself was co-authored and implemented by three working group members.
Activity in the past year has centred on two matters. Firstly, DCMI received a request for feedback on RDA (Resource Description and Access), a new standard for resource description and access designed for the digital world and built on foundations established by the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). In response to this request, a sub-group was established in order to provide access to the commercially sensitive drafts but the task has proved unwieldy and feedback has been minimal. In response to the invitation from CC:DA, the Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access within the America Library Association, Diane Hillmann undertook to provide a DCMI perspective to that body and produced some valuable feedback.
Secondly, the matter of re-using terms from MODS (the Metadata Object Description Schema developed by the Library of Congress) in a Dublin Core Application Profile. In the spirit of not inventing terms when they exist in another namespace, there are three terms in the DCMI Libraries Application Profile taken from the MODS schema. The mismatch between the underlying models is a complex area and has been problematic for the Application Profile for the past few years. The issues were articulated and extensively discussed on the list in April 2006 and a way forward is to be proposed. This will be progressed at the forthcoming meeting at DC-2006.
It is hoped to progress some of the issues raised about RDA at the special session on RDA at DC-2006. In addition, now that the drafts of RDA have been made publicly available, it may be possible to find a way to offer additional feedback.
Other than the MODS terms there are a few lesser matters to be finalised in the DCMI Libraries Application Profile, if it is to be submitted to the Usage Board for approval. The working group will address these outstanding items at the meeting at DC-2006.
This Working Group does not have a formal work plan and 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 with the global community, and especially for those where English is not the primary language.
The DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group Web page was updated with a number of presentations given at the previous Working Group Meeting, held at DC-2005.
The chart Web-accessible translations of Dublin Core Metadata Terms in Multiple Languages on the DCMI Localization and Internationalization Working Group Web page was updated. The Working Group would like to add the maintenance agency for each translation because the URL links fail over time.
There was a call for new translations of the DCMI Terms and one was received from Bulgaria.
DCMI is encouraging the establishment of DCMI Affiliates under the Affiliate Program. The Localization and Internationalization Working Group, as the only DCMI working group with a specific focus on these issues, has potential to collaborate with the Affiliates and to promote sharing and exchange of regional needs and information in the global community.
A revised Working Group charter was submitted in March 2006 as a result of the change of chairs: Andrew Wilson resigned and John Kunze from the California Digital Library became the new co-chair. The new charter states: “The DCMI Preservation Working Group is a discussion forum for individuals and organizations that are interested in metadata related to digital preservation. As a focus for discussion, over the course of a year this group will deliver a 6-page overview of the landscape of emerging preservation metadata standards, preservation frameworks, and the relationships of those standards to the DCMI view of metadata.”.
An analysis was planned to consider:
Unfortunately none of the projected activities has been realized, but first steps have been undertaken at SUB Göttingen to compare the DCMI metadata model with the PREMIS model.
Over the last year the Registry Working Group has acted as a focus for a variety of metadata schema registry activities taking place internationally. Although there has not been much traffic on the mailing list there has been exchange of news and pointers to project updates. There have been bi-lateral meetings between the The European Library registry group and the JISC IEMSR (UK), and other exchange of information with the DART registry (Australia), the NSDL registry (USA), and the ISO 11179 XMDR initiative.
Metadata schema registries have a wider scope than Dublin Core, so the Dublin Core processes for progressing recommendations and guidelines are not appropriate for much of the work of the various registry projects. This means that one of the main ‘drivers’ for working group activity is absent. Whilst the group has value as a focus point we need to consider carefully before taking on specific work items for the next year. Discussions at the Registry Working Group meeting at DC-2006 will inform future plans for the group.
Since the responsibility for Maintenance Agency activities was turned over to the Directorate after DC-2005, the only task on the 2006 work plan was to work on guidelines for national standardization. A call was sent out for contributions from people with experience, but only a single contribution from one country was received and more are needed. Some follow-up activities didn't give more contributions. The Working Group chair considers other options.
The DCMI Tools Working Group held a workshop as a parallel event at the international JCDL conference in June 2006, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The workshop was opened with a number of presentations giving an overview of metadata tools development and usage. This part was followed by a group work and brainstorming session which included discussion of available information transmission from international standardization to implementers of tools, services and functionalities. A detailed report of the workshop was published in DLib magazine in July 2006.
It was agreed at the Madrid and at the Chapel Hill meetings to develop an Application Profile and a classification vocabulary to describe services, tools, algorithms and functionalities. It is planned to present a first draft at the meeting in Manzanillo.
The ODRL/DCMI Profile Working Group was formed in February 2005. A Working Group mailing list was created, which attracted 41 members. A discussion paper was prepared and shared on the Working Group mailing list. However, there was no response to the discussion paper and little or no other discussion on the list. The group chairs therefore propose to close down the group.
DC-2006, the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2006, will be held from 3 through 6 October at the Barceló Karmina Palace Hotel in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico, hosted by the Department Coordinación General de Servicios y Tecnologías de Información (CGSTI) of the University of Colima.
The program chairs, Javier Solorio Lagunas of the University of Colima and Thomas Baker of DCMI, have prepared a very interesting conference program. The program features two keynotes, one on 3 October 2006 by Abel Packer of BIREME in Brazil and one on 6 October 2006 by Michael Crandall of the Information School at the University of Washington. In three plenary and four parallel paper sessions, 21 long and 7 short papers will be presented. Furthermore, in the workshop track, 13 Working Group sessions and eight special sessions are on the program. One each of the four conference days, tutorials will introduce basic as well as more advanced concepts related to the implementation of Dublin Core metadata in practice.
Online registration is open through the conference Web site until 2 October 2006. It will also be possible to register on-site during the conference.
At the end of August 2006, the general mailing list DC-General had 934 subscribers, a decrease of 14 compared to September 2005. On the other hand, the total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI Working Groups (not counting DC-General) increased from 2,127 to 2,239 over the last 12 months, an increase of 112. The largest Working Groups are: DCMI Libraries (335 subscribers), DCMI Education (289), DCMI Government (177), DCMI Architecture (158) and DCMI Collection Description (144).
The Web site statistics show that the average number of unique visitors to the DCMI Web site is now over 80,000 per month (January-August 2006), up from around 70,000 for the year 2005. Compared to that same period, the average number of visits to the Web site per month increased from 143,000 per month in 2005 to 149,000 per month in 2006.
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