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Makx Dekkers/2009-03-31
A main event in the past period was the independent incorporation of DCMI as a not-for-profit "Company limited by Guarantee" in Singapore. See the press release that was issued in early January 2009. In conjunction with the incorporation, a new set of by-laws were published that reflect the new situation, particularly involving a change of terminology, with the DCMI Board of Trustees now called the DCMI Oversight Committee, the DCMI Directorate now called the DCMI Executive and the DCMI Affiliate Program now called the DCMI Membership Program.
In October 2008, "A MoinMoin Wiki Syntax for Description Set Profiles" was published as a DCMI Working Draft. This syntax allows editors to embed constraint information about application profiles into normal Wiki documents and extract this information using an Open Source MoinMoin Wiki tool for display in XML.
In November 2008, a document describing "Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata" was published as a DCMI Working Draft, discussing the modeling choices involved in designing metadata applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural-language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework. At Level 3, data is structured as Description Sets (i.e., as records). At Level 4, data content is subject to a shared set of constraints (as described in a Description Set Profile). Conformance tests and examples are provided for each level.
In January 2009, the DCMI Usage Board published a structured set of criteria for reviewing application profiles based on the DCMI Abstract Model.
Dan Brickley made some edits to the assessment of FOAF against the Agents requirements in January 2009 and discussed with Tom Baker what should happen next. Dan, Tom and Andrew Wilson have agreed to prepare a note which will be a short, friendly introduction to FOAF for application profile designers. The purpose of the note is to provide a basic overview for interested users, not to cover the topic in great detail or to be the object of public comment and formal approval (i.e., a "DCMI Recommended Resource" not a working draft on Recommendation track).
Andrew will progress the draft by the end of March 2009. Tom will add some structure and placeholders for introductory text, possibly drawing on the background materials, though probably not before early April 2009.
Public Comment was held in September 2008 on the DCMI Proposed Recommendation "Expressing Dublin Core Description Sets using XML (DC-DS-XML)". The DC-DS-XML guidelines, formerly referred to as "DC-XML-Full", provide a straightforward serialization of all features of the DCMI Abstract Model. It is expected that DC-DS-XML will be finalized as a DCMI Recommendation in Spring 2009.
A related document, "Notes on DC-DS-XML XML Format", describes the development of the format and its relationship to an older DCMI Recommendation, "Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML" of 2003. The 2003 guidelines were defined before the development of the DCMI Abstract Model. While an interpretation of the 2003 XML format as a serialization of a "description set" can be constructed, the format supports only a limited subset of the Abstract Model. There has been discussion and some early wiki drafts of an updated "minimal" XML format ("DC-XML-Min"), work on which is currently on hold pending a clarification of requirements and the availability of an editor.
The DCMI Working Draft "Description Set Profiles: A constraint language for Dublin Core Application Profiles" by Mikael Nilsson (DC-DSP) has been taken as the basis of the DCMI Usage Board's "Criteria for the Review of Application Profiles". In a recent review of of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP), the Usage Board provided a full test of the DC-DSP model. Further implementation experience and discussion is sought before this specification will be put forward as a Proposed Recommendation.
The documents "Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles" and "Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata" currently provide the most accessible overview of the technical approach taken in the DCMI Architecture Forum. While the bulk of existing and legacy implementations using "the Dublin Core" and DCMI metadata terms can be said to reside on interoperability level 1 (sharing semantics as defined in natural language), and relatively few projects aim at implementing validatable records based on the full Description Set Profile model (levels 3 and 4), there has recently been rapid growth on level 2. Level 2 — shared formal semantics — is achieved when structured data is embedded in Web pages using RDFa ("RDF attributes"), extracted from XML formats using customized transformations ("GRDDL"), or expressed as "linked data" — the theme for DC-2009 in Seoul ("Semantic interoperability of linked data").
There has been little activity over the last six months for the Collections Application Profile Task Group. The co-chairs were recently reapproached, however, about the status of the DCMI Application Profile in regards to the NISO Collections Application Profile and will be working with the NISO group to determine whether to use the DCMI Application Profile or to further develop the NISO Collections Application Profile to align with the DCMI profile.
The Collections Application Profile also needs to be re-reviewed a final time for conformance with the Abstract Model and the Singapore Framework.
The Task Group held a working session at DC-2008 intended to further completion of a draft DCMI Education Application Profile Module. This session was well attended, and it was (and remains) clear that there is plenty of interest in the outcomes of this work from around the world. However, there was concern expressed about the dearth of volunteers with enough time to support this project, requiring, as it does, considerable resource. Community Moderators Sarah Currier and Diane Hillmann called again for help with volunteering, or project funding to enable this work to be completed.
Since the DC-2008 Conference Sarah and Diane have experienced diminished availability of time and resource for participation (both have been transitioning from employment offering support for standards work, to self-employed consultancy). Likewise, Lara Whitelaw of the UK Open University, who worked extremely hard on the requirements gathering in early 2008, was unable for some time to contribute. While these issues were somewhat ameliorated by the generous availability of Pete Johnston and Mikael Nilsson, and the extremely welcome formal commitment of help from the UK's JISC CETIS metadata domain experts, all of these folk have limited resource to give this work. Furthermore, the period since the DC-2008 Conference also saw a surge of activity in the ISO Metadata for Learning Resources work, which took much attention and energy from the available international educational metadata standards community.
Therefore, the Task Group has not made as much progress as hoped. Carrying over from last year's work plan, see the following work items and comments:
While both Community Moderators are in agreement that this Application Profile Module is a valuable piece of work, and both hope to have more time to give this year, there remains a concern about bringing together enough resource for completion to a good standard. Current plans are to inform the DCMI Education Community of this and work towards getting a more active Task Group under way. It seems counter-productive at present to keep adding dates to the above work items, when the Task Group is not clear when the work can be completed.
At DC-2008 the Government community has decided to close the work on the DCMI Government Application Profile in order to define a version 1.0. There has been no further activity since DC-2008. The workplan for the Task Group will be revised and version 1.0 of the Application Profile wil be published before DC2009.
The Kernel Metadata Task Group members have been looking at the draft Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles, published in November 2008. This document should help the group complete its main objective, which is to produce a Kernel Application Profile (KAP) by DC-2009. Previous KAP drafts are available at the Task Group's Wiki.
Late last year the Kernel Task Group was pleased to enter into a liaison with the Media Annotations Working Group (MAWG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There is significant relevance and overlap between the Kernel specification and the W3C group's ontology to facilitate cross-community data integration of information related to media objects in the Web, especially video objects. The liaison will involve exchanging materials, reviewing drafts, etc.
The report of the last meeting of the DCMI Libraries Community was sent to the Community via mailing list in November 2008. The moderators are in the process of revising the Community's Web site.
The Task Group has continued to work along with the RDA developers and publishers, with significant discussion occurring on the mailing list. Consultant Alistair Miles has been developing tests of the registered elements based on scenarios and mappings from MARC and MODS. Consultant Karen Coyle has been assisting in registering Roles, FRBR Group 2 elements, and other relationships as well as directing discussion on the list. She and Diane Hillmann met with ALA Publishing in January 2009 to work through some specific ideas for integrating the registered properties with the RDA Online product (a contract is in preparation to accomplish that). Gordon Dunsire is continuing to work with IFLA to set up the registration of the FRBR entities and the RDA/ONIX vocabularies, which we hope will be complete by the time RDA is officially released in the third quarter of 2009.
A full report of funded Task Group activities has been forwarded to the British Library and Siderean Software. After review by the funders, a version of the report will be posted on the Task Group Wiki.
Some interesting work has been occurring on the fringes of the DCMI Registry Community, partly inspired by the increased interest in registries as part of a more general focus on good software (or knowledge) engineering practices. In particular, recent JISC-funded work has begun to focus on the question of evaluation of the suitability of existing metadata profiles, and the registry, as a centrepoint for the lifecycle of application profile development, has taken a prominent place in that thinking. We hope to report back on some of this work, taking the scholarly works application profile as an example.
Work continues on synthesis of existing registry requirements; although this proved to be a difficult task initially an appropriate methodology has now been selected. We expect to be able to report back on this piece of work later in the year, when an updated timetable will also be made available.
A meeting between the moderators of the DCMI Tools Community took place March 2009 in Berlin, to discuss and work on the following issues:
At the DCMI Advisory Board meeting in Berlin on 27 September 2008, Seth Van Hooland of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium was appoined as co-moderator of the DCMI Tools Community, replacing Jane Greenberg. In the DCMI Social Tagging Community, Liddy Nevile handed over to Eva Méndez of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and Ana Alice Baptista of the Universidade do Minho, Portugal. It was also decided at the meeting of the Advisory Board to deactivate the DCMI Date Task Group.
Early in 2009, a new DCMI Community was established, the DCMI Science and Metadata Community, moderated by Jane Greenberg of the Metadata Research Center and School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, and Stu Weibel, OCLC, USA. The new Community is intended to be a a forum for individuals and organizations to exchange information and knowledge about metadata describing scientific data (data methodologically collected for research, analysis, tracking, forecasting, and other uses). The Community focuses on metadata challenges specific to scientific data curation, and solutions that will benefit from the architecture and global reach of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
Following its annual face-to-face meeting before the DC-2008 conference in September 2008, the Usage Board finalized a review of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP). SWAP was found to conform to the profile review criteria in all respects but one. The specific point on which SWAP does not follow the criteria relates to the matching algorithm specified in the Description Set Profile specification, currently still a working draft on which feedback is being sought. The issue could be resolved either by a small revision in SWAP or by a change in the matching algorithm.
In response to a proposal from the DCMI Libraries Community for a new property "holding location", the Usage Board suggested the use of the existing property "availability" in the AGLS Metadata Terms maintained by the National Archives of Australia. Suggestions regarding proposals for properties "date captured" and "version" were forwarded to the DCMI Libraries Community and Libraries Application Profile Task Group for further discussion.
The Usage Board is currently working with the AGLS Working Group on finalizing a DCMI property and related AGLS vocabulary encoding scheme for describing characteristics related to the accessibility of resources.
Seth van Hooland and Ana Alice Baptista joined the DCMI Advisory Board. The Advisory Board now consists of 52 members from 18 countries (Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US).
DC-2008, held in Berlin, Germany from 22 through 26 September 2008, was very well attended with 312 participants from 170 organizations in 39 countries. Presentations that were given in all tracks during the event are now linked from the Programme page.
DC-2009, the ninth International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will be hosted by the National Library of Korea at the National Digital Library in Seoul, Korea, from 12 through 16 October 2009. The Call for Papers is open until 24 April 2009.
In January 2009, a completely new version of the DCMI Conference Paper repository was installed at the National Library of Korea. The new repository includes the proceedings of all conferences from Tokyo 2001 until Berlin 2008.
At the end of February 2009, the general mailing list DC-General had 886 subscribers. The total number of subscriptions to the active DCMI mailing lists (not counting DC-General) increased from 2,698 to 2,909 in the period over the last twelve months, an increase of almost 8%. The largest groups are: DCMI Libraries Community (321 subscribers), DCMI Education Community (308), DCMI Scholarly Communications Community (201), DCMI Architecture Forum (200) and DCMI Government Community (166).
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