Executive Update: 15 November 2011

With this Update, the Executive team is starting a new informal reporting mechanism to update the DCMI advisory bodies (Oversight Committee & Advisory Board) once a month on the activities of the initiative in terms of Executive team actions. The goal is to: (1) summarize Executive activity and advisory body conversations; and (2) to foreshadow the Executive's short-term objectives/activities. We hope you find Update useful in pulling together the many threads that make up DCMI activities, goals and objectives.

If you have thoughts about how we can make the Update better, please let us know. If you have thoughts or comments regarding any matters covered that you think need additional discussion by either the Oversight Committee or the Advisory Board, please feel free to comment to the appropriate list.

• Next: December 2011 Update

Stuart A. Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director

1. Replacing the Current DCMI Website

   During the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board meetings at DC-2011, the need to replace the current DCMI website with a Drupal implementation that better enables the work of the initiative was discussed. Several of you (Paul Walk & Johannes Keizer) offered assistance with a DCMI effort in this regard. Of course, Paul and Johannes' help will be greatly appreciated as well as help from others in the Initiative with Drupal knowledge and experience. Over the past month or so, we have been talking with Mike Crandall about moving the project for a new website to fruition by means of the degree capstone program in the Information School at University of Washington (UW iSchool). We prepared a student project abstract (attached PDF) and it was made available to the students completing graduate degrees in the iSchool and needing to put together the required degree capstone project.

   We have had a great response from the graduate students. Here is the self-organized student team that will be working on the DCMI Drupal website through winter and spring:

   • Sarah Davies. Sarah is the Internet Operations Manager for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of the state of Washington. She has extensive training and experience with Drupal and information architecture. She is a candidate for a Master's Degree in Information Management at the University of Washington iSchool, where she has studied under Samantha Starmer and Mike Crandall, both members of the DCMI Oversight Committee. She is specifically experienced with Drupal user roles and permissions, integration of social media into Drupal websites, and effective methods of public education and interaction in online spaces.
     
     
   • Mark Squire. Mark is the Director of IT for the University of Washington School of Nursing. Mark led a project team to implement Drupal as the CMS for the School of Nursing last summer. This build is currently being used by University of Washington Marketing as the standardized Drupal build conforming to UW Marketing Standards. Mark is currently in the final year of the Mid-Career Master's of Science in Information Management. Mark is also currently the President of the Association of Information Management Students.
     
     
   • Isaac Pattis. Isaac currently works as a Consultant for Term Management, a start up launched by iSchool faculty member Mike Doane. He works largely in the SharePoint 2010 environment building and maintaining taxonomies for a diverse client base. He is in his final year of the Master's of Library and Information Science where his interests are focused largely on metadata management and information architecture. Acting as a current co-chair of the UW chapter of ASIS&T, he also actively organizes local information architecture/user experience (IA/UX) meetups and annual InfoCamp events.

   I have an initial day-long meeting with the students on 20 November. Once we get started, we do want to engage members of the DCMI community who have expressed an interest in helping. Since the capstone projects have a public presentation date of 31 May 2012, we can look forward to having at a minimum the architecture and core functionality in place at that time.

2. New Community/Task Group & Other Entities

   The following actions have been taken with regard to AB discussion and the formation (and transformation) of DCMI entities:

   • Vocabulary Management System Joint Task Group (wiki). Charge: The Architecture Forum/Registry Community Joint Task Group will (1) develop evaluation criteria for a DCMI vocabulary management system (VMS) that will meet current and future needs of DCMI; (2) assess existing candidate VMS applications based on the developed criteria; and (3) report its analysis to the Oversight Committee and Advisory Board along with its recommendation of one or two viable VMS candidates for replacing the current DCMI vocabulary management environment. The TG will also propose a community-driven approach to transition from the current to a new environment in light of its recommendations. Chairs: Corey Harper & Gordon Dunsire
     
     
   • FOAF Cooperation Task Group (wiki). Charge: The Task Group will: (1) implement and monitor the specific agreements outlined in the DCMI FOAF Agreement. These include the following commitments: (a) The FOAF Project will grant DCMI administrative and technical access to the domain xmlns.com; (b) DCMI will monitor payment of domain name fees by the FOAF Project; © The FOAF Project will provide public notice of impending semantic changes in the FOAF vocabulary; (d) DCMI will mirror the FOAF Subversion project (e) DCMI will monitor for outages in availability of the FOAF vocabulary and make a mirrored copy available if required; (f) If FOAF Project ceases activity, DCMI will maintain FOAF documentation. (2) consider the viability of the approach exemplified by this agreement as a model for similar arrangements with other vocabularies; (3) propose the [http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-namespace-generic/ DCMI Generic Namespace Policy for RDF Vocabularies] as a principled basis for such agreements, welcoming its extension or revision; (4) identify candidate properties in the DCMI and FOAF vocabularies for explicit semantic alignment. Chairs: Tom Baker & Dan Brickley
     
     
   • Membership Task Group (Private: wiki). Charge: The Joint OC/AB Task Group on Membership Programs will critically review the current criteria for membership in DCMI's Member & Partner programs to determine whether DCMI should: (1) include organizations based on criteria other than regional representation in the Member category; and (2) enhance opportunities for membership participation by revising the original membership fee structures to better reflect actual member capacity as well as existing and potential return on investment. In addition, the Task Group will explore potential direct DCMI services for membership organizations that could enhance return on investment and spur membership development. Chairs: Michael Crandall & Rachel Bruce.
     
     
   • Bibliographic Metadata Task Group (wiki (TBA)). Charge: To define components of current and emerging library and publishing [or bibliographic] metadata standards as RDF vocabularies for use in developing Dublin Core application profiles and semantic mappings. (formerly DCMI/RDA Task Group). Chairs: Gordon Dunsire & Diane Hillmann
     
     
   • Vocabulary Management Community (homepage & wiki). Charge: The DCMI Vocabulary Management Community is a forum and collaboration space for those interested in defining and documenting best practices for vocabularies, providing guidance for new practitioners, and promoting responsible change management. In addition, the Community will address design and quality issues in vocabularies and mappings in a modern Semantic Web environment. Interim Chair: Diane Hillmann (to manage the community launch & selection of inaugural chairs)
     
     
   • Schema.org Alignment Task Group (wiki). Charge: The Schema.org initiativehttp://schema.org/ aims at providing terms that webmasters can embed in Web pages to improve search results. For simplicity of adoption, the initiative is defining all of its terms in its own namespace. Where Schema.org terms overlap with DCMI metadata terms, this Task Group will define and publish formal mappings. The Task Group will work with the maintainers of Schema.RDFS.org -- "a complementary effort by people from the Linked Data community to support Schema.org deployment and usage with a special focus on Linked Data"--which has already published a placeholder for future mappings to Dublin Core. The Task Group will identify use cases for the mappings and define a process and workflow to create, publish, and maintain the mappings. Chairs: Tom Baker & Dan Brickley>

   In addition to the entities noted above, there are several others that I understand are in preparation for AB discussion: A Cultural Metadata Community (possibly subsuming DC-Libraries) and a Cultural Heritage Task Group. Also, I recently posted to the AB list regarding the need for two additional DCMI-Wide entities: Meetings & Conferences and Development & Training (Education). In the coming weeks or months, we will likely see proposals for these pending initiatives.

3. Event Planning
   
   
   • DC-2012. Planning is well underway for DC-2012 in Malaysia. Schubert Foo (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) and Hans Overbeek (Stichting ICTU, The Hague, Netherlands) will co-chair the Program Committee. Eric Childress has again agreed to serve as chair of Outreach. Dickson Lukose will chair the Local Organizing Committee and serve as liaison for the host, MIMOS Berhad. We will continue to fill chair positions over the next month or so. If you are interested in serving, please contact me. We have tentative plans for the conference website on the OCS to go live at 20 November and the Call for Participation to go out shortly thereafter.
     
     
   • NISO/DCMI Webinars. Planning for the 2012 NISO/DCMI Webinar series is well underway. We are increasing the number offered in 2012 from three to four. The webinars are tentatively scheduled on 22 February, 25 April, 22 August and 24 October. As for webinar topics, NISO states that Semantic Web and Linked Data are of particular interest. Also metadata issues around describing scientific data. We need to have the tentative program in place by close of this month…yes, this month (November). While we have tentative commitments for the first two (more on that later). If you have specific suggestions with regard to topics or qualified presenters, please contact Tom Baker. A modest stipend is available for presenters (and lots of glory).
     
     
   • DC-2013 & DC-2014. Tentative discussions have begun regarding DC-2013 and DC-2014. More about some of this very soon…
     
     
4. In the Pipeline
   
   
   • Kernel/ERC Metadata. From 26 May through 2 June, there was an extended conversation on the Advisory Board list regarding the Guildelines for Implementing Kernel/ERC Metadata as DCMI Recommended Resource. Tom and I have been working with John Kunze to move that along toward recommended status. We will have it back in front of the Advisory Board in the not-too-distant future as a draft recommendation where exactly what is being recommended is clear and how future development will be addressed is explicit.
     
     
   • DCMI FAQ & Glossary. We have started placing a rotating "teaser" on the website homepage for either a DCMI FAQ or glossary entry. We plan to rotate to a new FAQ or glossary entry with each build of the website. We are in the process of formulating a plan that will engage the DCMI community in the editorial process for FAQs and glossary terms that is positioned somewhere between an open editing environment like Wikipedia and one with tighter editorial controls that nevertheless invites community input at the level of individual entries. Expect to hear more about this in the near future; and, of course, your thoughts on how we can make this work are appreciated.

Raju Buddharaju, Financial and Administrative Officer, Director

At its International Conference each year, DCMI holds administrative meetings including its Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Members required under Singapore law governing non-profit companies limited by guarantee. At the AGM, representatives of the legal Members review and formally approve DCMI's annual financial audit and reappoint the auditors for the coming year. In addition to the AGM, the Oversight Committee meets to review the work and status of DCMI and to make decisions on future actions. Since the close of DC-2011, I have been handling the legal formalities by filing with Singapore authorities the annual audit and the documents reflecting decisions made at the AGM.

I have been moving forward with investigations regarding DCMI plans to initiate an online donation program. The Oversight Committee authorization to move forward with such a donation program was made some time ago and we hope to be back before the Advisory Board within a month or so for additional discussion regarding the particulars of such a program.

Finally, as the person responsible for the ongoing financial monitoring of DCMI, during the timeframe of this Update, I have reviewed and authorized payments regarding DCMI's ongoing financial obligations and invoiced for the revenue-generating activities of DCMI.

Thomas Baker, Chief Information Officer (Communications, Research and Development)

I'm supporting Stuart in most of the activities listed above, and these have kept us pretty busy since DC-2011.

Strategically, the DCMI/FOAF agreement and Schema.org alignment activities point towards a more proactive role for DCMI in publishing and maintaining mappings to related vocabularies.

Mappings will need to be handled differently from the traditional maintenance of terms by the Usage Board, constrained as it is by a Namespace Policy that aims at semantic stability.

There are many vocabularies to which we should be mapping, so the processes by which we decide mappings must be nimbler. The methods by which we we traditionally have generated, documented, and announced periodic releases of DCMI Metadata Terms are not well suited for publishing mappings at scale.

We will not be in a position to guarantee the semantic stability of mappings because the vocabularies to which we map may be moving targets, and our understanding of the mappings may evolve in response to feedback. We'll need convenient mechanisms for collecting user feedback and channeling it into a continual review process, and we should to be able to tweak the mappings without too much administrative or procedural overhead—something perhaps like a wiki environment. The infrastructural upgrades we are getting ready to explore for vocabulary maintenance will help enable such a process.

Diane Hillmann, Vocabulary Maintenance Officer

I have been focused on getting the DCMI Vocabulary Management Community up and running, adding new information to the Community wiki and sending some initial priority questions to the group's discussion list. In addition, I am communicating closely with the two chairs (Corey Harper & Gordon Dunsire) of the Vocabulary Management System Joint Task Group (see Stuart's report above), to assist them in getting started on their task. On November 16 I will present the last 2011 NISO/DCMI webinar: The RDA Vocabularies: Implementation, Extension, and Mapping.