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Makx Dekkers/2007-08-06
In March 2007, Andy Powell stepped down as chair of the DCMI Architecture Forum; his place was taken by Mikael Nilsson of KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Thomas Baker of DCMI who now jointly moderate the Forum.
In June 2007, a new DCMI Task Group was set up for collaborative work on Resource Description and Access (RDA), a library standard being developed for resource description and access in the digital world, building on foundations established by the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). The Task Group is led by Diane Hillmann of Cornell University and Gordon Dunsire of Strathclyde University. It was set up in response to recommendations of a meeting hosted by the British Library on 30 April and 1 May 2007 between people involved in DCMI, the Semantic Web community and developers of RDA. The charter of the Task Group is to define components of RDA as an RDF vocabulary for use in developing a Dublin Core application profile. The work will be done through a mailing list DC-RDA@jiscmail.ac.uk and a Wiki.
The DCMI Board of Trustees met on 18 March in Barcelona, Spain. The Board held a further conference call in June 2007. The Board discussed issues related to the longer-term strategic and financial issues.
The next meeting of the Board of Trustees will take place on 27 August 2007 in Singapore.
The DCMI Usage Board met in Barcelona on 16 and 17 March 2007.
In September 2006, a “Joint DCMI Architecture-Usage Board Workplan” outlined a set of coordinated activities to be undertaken between DC-2006 (Manzanillo) and DC-2007 (Singapore). As of July 2007, the Usage Board has completed the following tasks foreseen in that work plan:
In addition, the Usage Board completed a review of terms in the http://purl.org/dc/terms/ namespace — notably, to align definitions and comments those of terms in DCMES and to distinguish Vocabulary Encoding Schemes from Syntax Encoding Schemes. A batch of proposed changes has been posted for public comment in July 2007 and will be finalized at the Singapore Usage Board meeting.
In Singapore and beyond, the Usage Board will focus on the formal Description Profile Model as a basis for further application profile reviews.
The next meeting of the DCMI Usage Board will take place on 25 and 26 August 2007 in Singapore.
in the last months two new members were invited on the Advisory Board: Mikael Nilsson as co-moderator of the DCMI Architecture Forum and Gordon Dunsire as co-leader of the DCMI RDA Task Group.
The Advisory Board now consists of 52 members from 17 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA).
After two rounds of public comment in February and April 2007, a revised version of the DCMI Abstract Model became a DCMI Recommendation in June 2007.
A revised Namespace Policy became a DCMI Recommendation in July 2007 after a public comment period in April 2007.
The proposal for the assignment of “Domains and Ranges for DCMI Properties” was out for public comment in February and April 2007. 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 existing implementations of Simple Dublin Core in RDF, domains and ranges will not be specified for the fifteen properties of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), Version 1.1, which are identified by URIs in the DCMI namespace http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/. Rather, the document proposes to define fifteen new properties, which will be identified by URIs in the DCMI namespace http://purl.org/dc/terms/. Each of the fifteen new properties is to be a subproperty of the corresponding property of the DCMES, and is to be assigned domain and range as outlined in the proposal.
In the last few months, work has started on the development of what is called the DCMI Description Set Profile as part of a more formal DCMI Application Profile Model. See for an introduction to this work Mikael Nilsson's posting to the DC-Architecture list.
Following a Call for Tender published in May 2007, Fredrik Enoksson of Knowmania HB in Sweden was selected to design a Wiki format for Dublin Core Application Profiles which both renders the profile readably in HTML and is structured in such a way that it can be automatically converted by a script into an XML format. The work also includes designing and building a tool for transforming an Application Profile in the Wiki format into an XML representation of the profile. Results of this work are foreseen to be demonstrated at a plenary Architecture session at DC-2007 on Tuesday 28 August 2007.
As the result of a five-year review, an updated version of the “The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set” was published as revised ANSI/NISO standard Z39.85-2007. This new text has been submitted for the revision process of ISO standard 15836. A revision of RFC 2413: Dublin Core Metadata for Resource Discovery (1998) is also in process, based on the same text.
Following the publication in early March 2007, of two Calls for Tender, one for Analysis of and Recommendations for DCMI Web site and one for User-oriented introductory material and training resources, a contract was signed with Diane Hillmann. In August 2007, a questionnaire was published with questions on the usability and usefulness of the DCMI Web site and the information provided. A report on the results is expected to be published later in the year..
The DCMI Accessibility Community is closely linked into other accessibility communities — notably the W3C WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) community and the ISO, CEN and IMS communities. In the last twelve months, there have been significant, behind-the-scene activities as the WCAG is radically revised, the intellectual property issues are sorted out between the various standards organisations, and implementers try out the specifications. Finalization of the Accessibility Application Profile has been held up by these activities but the way is now clear and it is hoped the work can be completed in the second half of 2007.
Work is proceeding on the Agents Task Group deliverables, although not quite in line with the timetable. The functional requirements document is in the process of being revised. It is expected to be completed before DC-2007. Recently, Dan Brickley completed an analysis of the FOAF schema against the Agents description requirements document. That analysis was placed on the Agents Wiki in mid-June 2007 and an announcement was made on DC-Agents and DC-General mailing lists about its availability. The Agents Task Group hopes to meet informally in Singapore to continue discussion of work.
In September 2006, a “Joint DCMI Architecture-Usage Board Workplan” outlined a set of coordinated activities to be undertaken between DC-2006 (Manzanillo) and DC-2007 (Singapore). As of July 2007, the DCMI Architecture Forum has completed the following tasks foreseen in that work plan:
The development of the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile was finalised by the DCMI Collection Description Application Profile Task Group. The DCMI Usage Board, at their March 2007 meeting, agreed that it is conformant: it conforms with the DCMI Abstract Model, is internally consistent, and is documented according to guidelines. The Task Group are now investigating alignment with the related, proposed NISO Standard (Z39.91.200x) Metasearch Initiative Collection Description Specification. This will complete the work of the Task Group.
The Education Community has continued to invest energy in firing up interest in the Education Application Profile work. A major focus has been the development of criteria for including vocabulary recommendations in the Application Profile. Sarah Currier presented information on the Education Application Profile work to the UK Learning Object Metadata (LOM) community at a CETIS Metadata SIG Meeting in Manchester, UK on 16 April 2007. UK-based LOM implementers and users attended, showing keen interest in links with DCMI, and again, the methodology and criteria for recommending vocabularies in Application Profiles generated some lively and very useful discussion, which has been fed back into the criteria on the DCMI Education Community Wiki. A reasonable consensus has emerged as to the best way to approach gathering and disseminating information about potential vocabularies, i.e.:
As a result of this dissemination, new members have been steadily joining the DCMI Education Community mailing list, marking a resurgence of interest in the Community's work.
The Community will have a draft Application Profile document, and a draft of a recommended vocabularies document disseminated in time to present at DC-2007 for discussion. We expect that the new DCMI Application Profile Model will provide some food for thought, as we move towards community consensus and begin to plan to bring the AP to the Usage Board.
The bulk of the work in the DCMI Library Community this year has happened in the context of the liaison between various metadata communities and the RDA developers. Input to the RDA development process culminated in a meeting at the British Library in London where perspectives from DCMI, IEEE/LOM, SKOS and W3C were presented. Three main collaborative work items were proposed at the meeting: the declaration of an RDA element vocabulary, the disclosure of RDA value vocabularies using RDF and SKOS technologies, and the creation of an RDA Application Profile. A DCMI Task Group chaired jointly by Diane Hillmann and Gordon Dunsire has been established as the locus of this work and funding is being sought to take it forward.
Last year the decision was made to update the Libraries Application Profile and revise it by the removal of the three MODS elements and the creation of the required terms in the DCMI namespace. A Task Group was formed in December 2006 to carry out this work using a Wiki. It was not possible to put the Libraries Application Profile into the Wiki to enable collaborative editing and work on this has stalled. A solution to the creation of application profiles using Wikis is under development and it is hoped this will offer a way forward before too long. Things have moved on however, and the Library of Congress is now doing some work on modeling MODS in RDF and could then offer URIs for the required terms. The timescales for this are as yet unknown.
The future of the Libraries Application Profile should be considered in the light of the work items of the RDA Task Group as there is clearly a need to define the relationship between the profiles. This will be discussed on the DCMI Libraries Community mailing list and at the meeting at DC-2007.
The moderators of the DCMI Registry Community participated in the Metadata Open Forum in New York in early July 2007. A meeting of the group is planned at DC-2007, in which the moderators plan to report back from recent events, share recent developments and discuss topics of interest to registry developers, users and other stakeholders. We have identified several topics that we expect to be of interest to Registry members — metadata vocabulary management in particular seems to be a relevant and active topic.
This community first came together at DC-2006. A lively session was held at that conference and one of the outcomes was the installation of a Wiki with resources for people with an interest in how taggers could make good Dublin Core metadata. The wiki has attracted a lot of interest. It is time now to renew the resources, to update the lessons from the increased maturity of social tagging as an activity, and to decide on the future of the DCMI Social Tagging community. A session will be held at DC-2007 at which reports of progress in the field will be offered by those present (and some remotely) and the Wiki resources will be enriched. New leaders for the community are sought if it is to continue.
In the last year, several draft documents were created to standardize and improve the documentation and access to metadata tools, including information about the tool functionalities. The DCMI Tools Community's definition of tools includes both applications used to generate metadata (such as an editor or generator), as well as algorithms that can be integrated into a metadata tool. The draft documents we created include the following: a draft version of the DCMI Tools Metadata Application Profile for describing metadata tools (http://dublincore.org/groups/tools/map.shtml —top of the page); a controlled vocabulary to aid standardizing the description of applications and to be used with the DCMI Tools Metadata Application Profile ( http://dublincore.org/groups/tools/map.shtml — bottom of the page); a glossary that provides definitions for the controlled vocabulary concepts and other terms important to understand the functionalities and design of metadata tools and algorithms.
The moderators of the group organized and sponsored a workshop at the ELPUB conference in Wien (Vienna), Austria, on 13 June 2007. The workshop was attended by 10 people, and the draft documents noted above were reviewed. Thomas Severiens produced a summary report, which includes slides he presented and integrates feedback and questions from workshop participants. Furthermore, a paper was published on our draft documents in the ELPUB Proceedings. A forthcoming report on the DCMI Tools Application Profile will be published in the DC-2007 Proceedings.
The group intends to determine the extent to which the DCMI Tools Community documentation noted above should become DCMI formal documents, and discussion of this issue is foreseen at the DCMI Tools Community meeting at DC-2007, and with Tom Baker, the chair of the DCMI Usage Board.
The Web site of this year's conference DC-2007 was installed in May 2007. The conference will be held in Singapore in the week of 27-31 August 2007, and is hosted by the National Library Board of Singapore in cooperation with the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University. The Guest of Honour is Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for Community Development, Youth & Sports and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts who will officially open the conference. Keynote speeches will be given by Johannes Keizer of FAO (Rome, Italy) and Zhang Xiaoxing of the National Cultural Information Resource Center (Beijing, China). The program further includes four Tutorials (Monday 27 August 2007), 16 conference papers, 16 workshop and special sessions, and two seminars (Friday 31 August 2007).
At the end of July 2007, the general mailing list DC-General had 882 subscribers. The total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI mailing lists (not counting DC-General) increased from 2,251 to 2,344 in the period over the last twelve months, an increase of 93. The largest groups are: DCMI Libraries Community (328 subscribers), DCMI Education Community (292), DCMI Government Community (173), DCMI Architecture Forum (164) and DCMI Collection Description Community (154).
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 93,000 per month, up from an average of around 83,000 per month in 2006. The average number of visits to the Web site per month increased from 160,000 in 2006 to 213,000 in the last half year, a 33% increase. Since the beginning of 2007, accesses to the DCMI Web site were recorded from 196 countries and territories around the world. Top-10 of accesses came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Spain, Italy, India and the Netherlands. Top-10 locations were London (UK), Dublin (Ireland), Paris (France), Madrid (Spain), New York (US), Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Washington DC (US), Seattle (US), Melbourne (Australia) and Sydney (Australia).
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