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Makx Dekkers/2007-03-05
At DCMI meetings in Manzanillo in October 2006, a new structure for technical work was discussed and approved. DCMI Working Groups are restructured as DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups. A DCMI Community, with a Web page and mailing list, serves as a forum for open discussion on special topics or domain applications. A DCMI Task Group develops specific deliverables such as application profiles on a DCMI wiki. A special case was made for the architectural work that now takes place in the DCMI Architecture Forum.
Between October and December 2006, most Working Groups have converted to DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups. All groups are listed on the overview page of DCMI's work structure. On the DCMI Contact information page there are now also links to all public DCMI Wikis with contact information of the Wiki managers.
While many of the Working Groups chairs are continuing their work as DCMI Community moderators or DCMI Task Group leaders, there have been a number of changes. New Community moderators are: Ann Apps (DCMI Collection Description Community), Raju Buddharaju (DCMI Preservation Community), Sarah Currier (DCMI Education Community), Matthias Menger (DCMI Environment Community), and Jon Phipps and Emma Tonkin (DCMI Registry Community). New Task Group Leaders are: Muriel Foulonneau and Sarah L. Shreeves (DCMI Collection Description Application Profile Task Group), and Hans Overbeek (DCMI Government Application Profile Task Group). These people have also become members of the DCMI Advisory Board. Pete Johnston (Collection Description), Eric Childress (Date), Stuart Sutton (Education), Sarah Rice (Global Corporate Circle), Heike Neuroth and John Kunze (Preservation) and Rachel Heery (Registry) have stepped down as chairs. The DCMI Directorate thanks the retiring chairs for their efforts in furthering the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and wishes the new Community Moderators and Task Group Leaders success in their new responsibilities.
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 7 October in Manzanillo. The Board held a further conference call in December 2006.
At its meeting and conference call, the Board of Trustees discussed status and progress of strategic, legal and financial issues. The Board formally appointed Sam Oh of Sungkyunkwan University as the representative of the National Library of Korea, the DCMI Affiliate in Korea. Joseph Busch of Taxonomy Strategies and Shigeo Sugimoto of Tsukuba University were reconfirmed for a new three-year term on the Board.
The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 18 March 2007 in Barcelona.
The DCMI Usage Board met in Manzanillo on 30 September and 1 October 2006.
In Manzanillo, the Usage Board discussed comments received on proposed editorial changes to terms in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set in a Public Comment period held from 28 August through 25 September 2006. A response to comments and decision text documenting approved changes were published, along with revised terms documentation, on 18 December 2006. The decision texts and revised specification provided the basis for a proposal to NISO for a five-year review of the NISO standard Z39.85-2001, the ballot of which is being held from 23 January to 8 March 2007. In parallel, John Kunze and Thomas Baker have prepared an updated version of RFC 2413 ("The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set") for review and approval by IETF. Following its review of the Collection Description Application Profile in Manzanillo, the Usage Board provided feedback to the DCMI Collection Description Working Group (renamed Collection Description Application Profile Task Group) and expects to review a revised version of the profile at its mid-year meeting in March.
The next meeting of the DCMI Usage Board will take place on 16 and 17 March 2007 in Barcelona.
The DCMI Advisory Board met in Manzanillo, Mexico, on 2 October 2006 to discuss the activities of the DCMI Working Groups and general operational issues. At that meeting, a proposal from the Directorate to restructure the activities within DCMI was accepted which led to the establishment of DCMI Communities and DCMI Task Groups.
At the end of 2006, Sarah Currier, Matthias Menger, Jon Phipps, Emma Tonkin, Muriel Foulonneau, Sarah L. Shreeves and Hans Overbeek were appointed to the Advisory Board.
The Advisory Board membership now includes 50 members from 16 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the USA).
The DCMI Abstract Model, which attained the status of DCMI Recommendation in March 2005, was revised in light of discussion and feedback from the DCMI Architecture Working Group, the DCMI Usage Board, and the broader community. This revised version of the Abstract Model was posted for a four-week public comment period from 5 February to 5 March 2007.
A revised DCMI Namespace Policy proposing a new DCMI namespace for Abstract Model entities was posted for comment at the same time.
In connection with the revision of the DCMI Abstract Model, Andy Powell developed a proposal for a vocabulary of classes and their use as the domains and ranges of metadata elements maintained by DCMI. Domains and ranges specify — in a form usable for inferencing — what kind of described resources and value resources are associated with a given property. The assignment of formal domains and ranges makes the meanings implicit in natural-language definitions available for machine processing. So as not to affect the conformance of legacy implementations of Simple Dublin Core in RDF, DCMI proposes to replicate the fifteen elements of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set — currently identified using the namespace http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ — in the namespace http://purl.org/dc/terms/. Terms in the former namespace are to remain unspecified as to domain and range; terms in the latter are to be assigned domains and ranges as outlined in the proposal. This proposal was also posted for Public Comment from 5 February through 5 March 2007.
At the end of 2006, the DCMI Usage Board completed an editorial revision of terms in the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, bringing definitions and usage comments into line with the DCMI Abstract Model. Documentation is available in revised Web pages, RDF schemas, and in a response to comments received during the Public Comment period.
The DCMI Web site was restructured in November and December 2006 to reflect the new work structure describe above.
After expiration of the agreement with Joe Tennis of the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and Siderean Software for the hosting of the DCMI Conference Paper Repository, the National Library of Korea has agreed to take over the hosting of the Repository. The Repository continues to be accessible through the PURL http://purl.org/dcpapers.
In early March 2007, DCMI published two Calls for Tender, one for Analysis of and Recommendations for DCMI Web site and one for User-oriented introductory material and training resources.
The DCMI Accessibility Community brings together experts and others from a wide range of contexts. There is significant work in other forums and in many respects, all this work needs to be coordinated to be effective. The Accessibility application profile being developed depends on technologies outside the accessibility field as well, and some of them are in flux. So the community has been exposing its plans and seeking feedback from as many people as possible, including developers who are likely to implement the profiles. Recent discussions on the lists have elicited important points of view and helped to give a sense of what implementers and users might want.
There is an ambitious program for the Task Group charged with recommendations for the profile. It is hoped that the work will be completed in time for presentation at the DCMI Conference in August 2007.
Following the DC-AB meeting in Manzanillo the Agents Working Group is in the process of being reformed as a Task Group and Community. While there was little traffic on the Agents mailing list, there has been a useful discussion of agent description issues on the DC-General mailing list. This discussion will valuable input for the activities of the Agents Task Group. The group's chairs have been working in the background on further documentation and a workplan for the task Group, and the initial members of the Task Group, Andrew Wilson, Tom Baker and Dan Brickley have been undertaking preliminary work looking at other models for agent description.
The Architecture Forum and wiki have been used to draft and finalize the documents that are described in the section on Technical developments above. Following the public comment period for these documents, a new batch of documents is expected to come out for public comment in the near future, and particularly revised recommendations for XML and RDF encoding.
The Citation Working Group was deactivated at the Advisory Board meeting in October 2006, as the work of this group as indicated by its charter was complete (“To agree on mechanisms for providing a DC-compliant set of metadata properties for recording citation information for bibliographic resources.”).
Work of this group has continued in the Collection Description Application Profile Task Group, chaired by Sarah L. Shreeves and Muriel Foulonneau with membership of Ann Apps, Douglas Campbell, Ann Chapman, Gordon Dunsire, Tom Habing, Juha Hakala, Pete Johnston, Jon Phipps and Theo van Veen.
The Collection Description Application Profile (CDAP) was submitted to the Usage Board in August 2006. This task force was formed in December 2006 to finalize the CDAP. The task group has been working on responding to the Usage Board comments, in particular, an explanation of the application model, a scope statement for the profile, and some terminology and labelling issues. The discussions of the task group can be found in the archives of its mailing list. The task group plans to submit the modified application profile for review by the Usage Board, early in March 2007.
This group is in the process of converting from a Working Group to a Task Group. By the end of March 2007 a workplan will be drafted and circulated by Douglas Campbell, the Task Group leader.
The DCMI Education Community is working deliberately to meet its goal of a modular Application Profile to be presented for community discussion in Singapore. With new co-moderator Sarah Currier on board, several work items have been completed:
Since the DC-2006 conference there has been no activity on the DC-Government Application Profile (DC-GAP) wiki. There is still interest to finalize the DC-GAP and have it 'recognized' by the DCMI Government Community. Ideas have been posted to the DC-Government mailing list to let the DC-GAP support other views of organizational information beyond the bibliographic view, such as Records Management, Document Management, Content Management and Knowledge Management.
In preparation for tackling the Kernel Application Profile (KAP), the DCMI Kernel Metadata Task Group Wiki page, including the work plan and working draft documents, was set up at http://dublincore.org/kernelwiki/.
A call for participation was issued in December 2006. As a result of the call, the Task Group will be comprised initially of 6 persons: Pete Johnston, Tom Baker, Jon Mason, Charles Blair, John Kunze and a student of the University of North Texas.
This group will begin looking into completing the KAP and establishing procedures for maintenance of the profile. Group members are now in the process of organizing the first conference call. Among the agenda items being considered is the relationship between the KAP and the evolution of the Kernel Metadata specification itself; for example, it may be that the KAP process may help debug and strengthen the Kernel specification.
Next steps include comparing the core Dublin Core semantics and DCMI Abstract Model with kernel metadata elements and the Electronic Resource Citation (ERC) record structure. The group shall also critically examine the contribution of the “story context“ to the easy of mapping between Kernel elements and Dublin Core metadata terms. Drawing up a catalog of ERC story types would also be useful.
The DCMI Libraries Application Profile Task Group was established on 12 December 2006. Mary Woodley has agreed to be co-leader of the group. The task of the group is take the Libraries Application Profile (DC-Lib) through the final stages of revision and submit it to the Usage Board for their review and registration. The work is not fully underway yet but a work plan will be posted to the wiki and the email list shortly. At that point participants will be sought to undertake specific tasks.
The last draft of DC-Lib was produced in September 2004 and it has not been revised since. Next steps for the Task Group will be:
It is hoped that the revised draft will be ready to submit tot he Usage Board in time for its meeting in August 2007.
The change of chair from Rachel Heery to Jon Phipps and Emma Tonkin took a little while, but is now well under way. Similarly, the re-chartering as a DCMI Community has led to some discussion of possible changes in focus for the group. There is a perception that the group has in the past focused principally on the DCMI Registry work, and that a shift in emphasis, with more outreach to related communities, would be of benefit.
We plan to seed the list with regular discussion points in the first instance, in order to gather some information about current preoccupations and interests, and perhaps spark some discussions.
We are also looking at the possibility of a Registries-related workshop, and are currently brainstorming some options.
This experimental community that was set up after the DC-2006 conference in October 2006, has been quietly active for the last six months. New members have regularly joined the list and there has been reference to the resources provided by the community in other locations. The community is not just curious but keen to achieve some positive results for DCMI and so a small group has been planning some early research. The aim is to investigate how social tagging and Dublin Core metadata can work together. There are many communities both participating in social tagging and doing tagging research so it is important that the DCMI Social Tagging Community works on relevant and interesting tasks that will benefit DCMI. A feature of the Community has been the effort to ensure that non-English speaking community members can participate and this effort has been relatively successful in the last six months.
In the context of an agreement between DCMI and NISO concerning the 5-year review of ANSI/NISO standard Z39.85 (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set — 2001), DCMI has delivered a proposal for a revised standard to be balloted in NISO in 2007. The NISO ballot for the revision to Z39.85, The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has started in January 2007 and runs until 8 March 2007. The revised standard and both of the change documents (summary and detailed) are publicly available at: http://www.niso.org/standards/balloting.html.
A revised version of RFC2413 was published by John Kunze in February 2007.
We are making progress on our application profile including a glossary of definitions of “tools”, “algorithms”, “applications”, etc.
We submitted a workshop proposal (spring workshop) to the 2007 elPub conference that will take place in Vienna from 13 until 15 June 2007 and are expecting the notification of the review results in February 2007. At the spring workshop we will discuss the application profile, the glossary, and future activities.
DC-2006 was held 3-6 October 2006 in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico, hosted by the University of Colima, with almost 250 participants from 24 countries. Key topics were model-based interoperability, controlled vocabularies, and practical deployment issues. Presentations of the conference papers are available for download from the conference program, while the Tutorials are available from the Training Resources page on the DCMI Web site.
This year's conference DC-2007 will be held in Singapore in the week of 27-31 August 2007, hosted by the National Library Board in cooperation with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University. The Program Committee is chaired by Abdus Sattar Chaudhry of Nanyang Technological University and Stuart Sutton of the University of Washington. The call for papers was published on the DCMI Web site in January 2007. The deadline for submission of papers is 2 April 2007.
At the end of February 2007, the general mailing list DC-General had 914 subscribers. The total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI mailing lists (not counting DC-General) increased from 2,172 to 2,276 over the last 6 months, an increase of 104. The largest groups are: DCMI Libraries Community (330 subscribers), DCMI Education Community (278), DCMI Government Community (173), DCMI Architecture Forum (160) and DCMI Collection Description Community (150).
According to the Web site statistics, the average number of unique visitors to the DCMI Web site increased over the last half year to over 88,000, up from 81,000 in the six months prior to the previous report in September 2006. Compared to that same period, the average number of visits to the Web site per month increased from 153,000 to 183,000 in the period since the last report. In February 2007, accesses to the DCMI Web site were recorded from 161 countries around the world. Top-10 of accesses came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Spain, Australia, Italy, India and the Netherlands. Top-10 locations were Seattle, Madrid, Paris, London, Ottawa, Toronto, Washington DC, Rome, Moscow and Athens.
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