Executive Update: 30 January 2012

Stuart A. Sutton, Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director

1. Dublin-to-Drupal and DCMI Communities

   

   The Dublin-to-Drupal (D2D) working team is gearing up for work on a Drupal website for Dublin Core. There will be a second face-to-face meeting at the University of Washington on 2 February between the development team and some members of the Executive. Discussions will be focused on functionality to support DCMI groups—loosely framed as "DCMI-recognized aggregations of individuals with a common set of metadata interests and objectives". This definition is intended to encompass groups ranging from Communities and Task Groups, through advisory bodies to the Executive. Group functionality falls into three general areas:

   1. Ecology Watch:
      Functionality supporting the automated aggregation of information feeds from relevant sources and the ability of community members to quickly and easily submit information about upcoming events, projects of interest and other valuable resources for reference and community discussion. Ecology watch is intended to provide DCMI authenticated users with the means to actively contribute in an on-going basis to community awareness with minimal demands on content creation.
      
      
   2. Communications & Social Networking:
      In addition to inclusion of forums, blogs and commenting features supporting group communication, this area also includes the integration of existing 3rd-party social networking features such as "like this page" on Facebook and "tweet this page" on Twitter, among others.
      
      
   3. Group Authoring:
      Through the work of its Communities and Task Groups, DCMI community members are engaged in authoring of specifications and various forms of best practice documentation and user guides. Group authoring functionality will support community engagement in creating such resources including appropriate content type templating to facilitate input, workflows, editorial processes and publication.

   The Dublin to Drupal project website can be found at http://dublintodrupal.org/. The project also has closed wiki and list. Team participants currently include:

   1. University of Washington:
      • Sarah Davies
      • Mark Squire
      • Isaac Pattis
      • Mike Crandall (advising)
      • Joe Tennis (advising)
   2. DCMI Executive
      • Stuart Sutton
      • Diane Hillmann
      • Tom Baker
   3. DCMI Community Members
      • Paul Walk (UKOLN) (advising)
      • Johannes Keizer (UN FAO) (advising)

   If you are interested participating or contributing expertise to the Dublin to Drupal project, please feel free to contact me. Of course, any questions or concerns you might have can be raise on the Oversight Committee or Advisory Board lists and will be promptly addressed.

2. DCMI-UK Regional Meeting at the British Library: "5 Years On"
   
   In Diane's report below, she discusses the 5th year anniversary of the London data modeling meeting that launched the work of the JSC/DCMI RDA collaboration. I want to note here that the "5 Years On" meeting is the first of what DCMI hopes will be a full and ongoing series of DCMI-endorsed regional meetings. Stemming from discussions in Advisory Board meetings over several years, a commitment was made at the DC-2011 meeting that DCMI would begin to provide services for DCMI-endorsed regional meetings. Those services would include website services, registration services if needed, aggressive promotion of the events by DCMI and the longterm curation of, and access to, meeting assets (papers, reports, presentations, etc.). The website for this DCMI-UK meeting in London is up on the DCMI Open Conference System. The term "regional meeting" may be somewhat of a misnomer since the goal is to provide DCMI endorsement and support to meetings of interest either organized by DCMI community members or of high interest to the DCMI community. Such meetings may or may not be regional in nature.
   
   
3. DC-2012 Malaysia
   
   With this Update, we are just a little under eight weeks away from the submission deadline for DC-2012 in Malaysia. As we noted in the December Update, the conference working committees are in place and the peer review committee is ready and keynote speakers and tutorial presenters are also lined up. With the collocation of DC-2012 with Knowledge Technology Week 2012, it looks like to will be a truly exciting conference.
   
   

   In November I sent an email to the chairs amongst you asking you to distinguish between DCMI community workshop sessions intended to advance the work of communities/task groups and special sessions where work in the topical area of your communities is showcased and positions on interesting topics discussed by experts (researchers & practitioners). We would like encourage chairs to work with your communities to submit proposals as special or panel sessions "Sponsored by...[name of the community]". We want to reinforce this distinction between DCMI community working sessions and special sessions of community (and more general) interest because the conference committee apparatus tries to promote the special sessions as part of the more general program while leaving the workshop session promotion to the communities. The result is that special sessions get more pre-conference "attention" and a resulting higher attendance. It would be very exciting with DC-2012 in Malaysia if at least a couple of DCMI communities put together special sessions. Since special sessions are part of the regular conference scheduling, we need to have proposals in by close of the submission process on 23 March as outlined in the Call for Participation.

   Of course, the Conference Committee hopes that all members of DCMI's advisory bodies will go out of their way to encourage metadata researchers and practitioners doing interesting work to submit to DC-2012. Remember that the International Conference is about both Dublin Core and metadata applications from across the metadata ecology. Also remember that interesting work in progress has a conference place through the poster sessions.

4. Summary Website and Listserv Statistics for 2011
   
   I have included below summary tables of DCMI communications statistics comparing 2010 traffic with 2011. I have interspersed some personal observations and analysis after each table. Table 1 shows the comparative averages based on Google Analytics. Table 2 shows the comparison of listserv traffic for the communities and task groups. Table 3 provides data on membership growth for both the listservs membership and the Twitter account.

   TABLE 1: 2010-2011 Comparison—Google Analytics "Pageviews"

   Overall	Average 2010	Average 2011	Percent Change
   Visitors	25,696	26,837	4.4
   Visits	35,962	38,448	6.9
   Pageviews	87,682	91,715	4.6
   Individual Pageviews	Average 2010	Average 2011	Percent Change
   http://dublincore.org/about/contact/	227	450	98.2
   http://dublincore.org/resources/translations/	338	533	57.7
   http://dublincore.org/sitemap/	336	523	55.7
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmes-xml/	611	850	39.1
   http://dublincore.org/documents/1998/09/dces/	950	1,279	34.6
   http://dublincore.org/about/copyright/	229	305	33.2
   http://dublincore.org/community-and-events/	886	1,133	27.9
   http://dublincore.org/documents/1999/07/02/dces/	411	511	24.3
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-namespace/	464	574	23.7
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-html/	550	672	22.2
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml/	470	563	19.8
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines/	344	407	18.3
   http://dublincore.org/tools/tools/tool-3.shtml	160	187	16.9
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/	6,829	7,938	16.2
   http://dublincore.org/documents/	543	622	14.5
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/	6,476	7,379	13.9
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/	1,921	2,170	13.0
   http://dublincore.org/usage/terms/history/	613	674	10.0
   http://dublincore.org/about-us/	905	994	9.8
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/	964	1,046	8.5
   http://dublincore.org/projects/	347	374	7.8
   http://dublincore.org/tools/	781	830	6.3
   http://dublincore.org/metadata-basics/	6,940	7,359	6.0
   http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/	545	568	4.2
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/	1,181	1,206	2.1
   http://dublincore.org/specifications/	5,959	5,964	0.1
   http://dublincore.org/documents/singapore-framework/	220	219	-0.5
   http://dublincore.org/documents/profile-guidelines/	920	906	-1.5
   http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/	4,117	3,956	-3.9
   http://dublincore.org/documents/abstract-model/	1,010	960	-5.0v
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-rdf/	570	522	-8.4
   http://dublincore.org/documents/interoperability-levels/	354	324	-8.5
   http://dublincore.org/documents/2000/07/11/dcmes-qualifiers/	413	376	-9.0
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-ds-xml/	225	200	-11.1
   http://dublincore.org/schemas/rdfs/	420	361	-14.0
   http://dublincore.org/workshops/	278	232	-16.5
   http://dublincore.org/resources/training/	1,187	971	-18.2
   http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/glossary.shtml	494	397	-19.6
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-dsp/	196	154	-21.4
   http://dublincore.org/documents/library-application-profile/	459	341	-25.7
   http://dublincore.org/news/2011/	336	130	-61.3
   Encoding Guidelines
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/	1,181	1,206	2.1
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-html/	550	672	22.2
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/	964	1,046	8.5
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-ds-xml/	225	200	-11.1
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-rdf/	570	522	-8.4
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmes-xml/	611	850	39.1
   http://dublincore.org/documents/dcq-rdf-xml/	470	563	19.8
   TOTAL:	4,571	5,058	10.7

   The overall statistics for DCMI website traffic are positive with modest increases between 4.4% and 6.9% with visitors, visits and page views. The individual views for pages with the highest traffic have been highlighted and reveal a fairly consistent pattern with statistics of recent years focusing on metadata basics, the DCMI specifications and user assistance. Of this group, the 3.9% drop with the User Guide may result from the somewhat fractured presence of old and new versions of the Guide. Figuring out which to read and whether one supersedes the other presents difficulties for users. As the new Drupal site is developed, we'll be paying close attention to those pages that show relatively substantial drops in traffic.

   TABLE 2: 2010-2011 Comparison—Monthly Listserv Messages

   Lists	Average Monthly Posts 2010	Average Monthly Posts 2011	Total Posts 2011	Percentage of Total 2011
   DC-GENERAL	11.75	12.08	145	26.8
   DC-ARCHITECTURE	14.17	7.58	91	16.8
   DC-RDA	4.67	3.92	47	8.7
   DC-PROVENANCE	4.29	3.67	44	8.1
   DC-GOVERNMENT	3.67	3.08	37	6.8
   DC-SCIENCE	2.83	2.17	26	4.8
   DC-EDUCATION	11.58	2.08	25	4.6
   DC-SOCIAL-TAGGING	1.67	2.00	24	4.4
   DC-KM	1.25	1.50	18	3.3
   DC-GLOSSARY	6.42	17	3.1	1.42
   DC-KERNEL-KAP	4.08	1.17	14	2.6
   DC-REGISTRY	0.83	1.17	14	2.6
   DC-LIBRARIES	1.75	1.17	14	2.6
   DC-INTERNATIONAL	0.75	0.50	6	1.1
   DC-SCHOLAR	0.92	0.50	6	1.1
   DC-PRESERVATION	1.67	0.50	6	1.1
   DC-ACCESSIBILITY	0.08	0.25	3	0.6
   DC-NKOS	0.25	0.25	3	0.6
   DC-TOOLS	0.67	1	0.2	0.08
   DC-KERNEL	0.42	0.00	0	0.0
   Total	73.72	45.08	541	100

   The statistics for DCMI listserv traffic for DCMI Communities and Task Groups continued to be problematic in 2011 with the average number of monthly posts dropping rather precipitously by 39% from 2010 levels. As reports over the years from Oversight Committee and Advisory Board meetings indicate, relatively low levels of community participation in listserv discussions has been a matter of concern. While somewhat a matter of conjecture on my part, these issues may stem largely from the generally amorphous notion within the Initiative of what DCMI communities actually are, what purposes they serve or indicators of their health. As has been suggested by some members of the DCMI advisory bodies, listserv traffic is likely not the most useful indicator.

   There are some general observations that hold:

   1. Traffic seems largely dependent on focus—when a community has a specific task to accomplish, traffic increases, sometimes dramatically. For example, the Architecture Forum was relatively quiet in 2011 yet the last month of the year and the first of 2012 show a substantial increase resulting from a targeted work agenda.
   2. Those critical of a focus on listserv traffic as the nearly sole indicator of a community's health might well be correct (or partially correct). There has been some discussion around focusing questions of a community's base-line viability not on listserv discussions but rather on whether the community serves needs defined above in the Dublin-to-Drupal report as "ecology watch". In other words, does the community at a minimum provide a locus for community-submitted information about what is happening globally in that community's area of metadata interest. As we have seen, listservs as a technology cannot serve this function very well.
   3. Some entities defined as communities don't actually represent communities of metadata practice or discourse but areas of desired DCMI-wide activity. For example, some current communities are focused on aspects of "ecology watch"—DC-Tools is a good example. Others focus on DCMI-wide interests such as translation of our specifications. Holding the entities supporting these activities to a listserv discussion bench-mark may well miss the mark.

   

   While difficult to read, the graph above demonstrates the distribution of listserv traffic over the course of 2011. As we have come to expect, the traffic peaks around the time of the International Conference when DCMI in general is preparing for the conference as are communities and task groups..

   TABLE 3: 2010-2011 Comparison—Listserv Membership

   Listservs	December 2010	December 2011	Increase (percentage)	Increase numbers)
   DC-NKOS	20	23	15.0	3
   DC-RDA	153	172	12.4	19
   DC-SCIENCE	206	229	11.2	23
   DC-PROVENANCE	38	42	10.5	4
   DC-ARCHITECTURE	242	254	5.0	12
   DC-TOOLS	100	103	3.0	3
   DC-INTERNATIONAL	110	111	0.9	1
   DC-SOCIAL-TAGGING	141	142	0.7	1
   DC-LIBRARIES	305	305	0.0	0
   DC-KM	131	131	0.0	0
   DC-KERNEL	59	59	0.0	0
   DC-GENERAL	853	849	-0.5	-4
   DC-EDUCATION	258	256	-0.8	-2
   DC-SCHOLAR	187	185	-1.1	-2
   DC-REGISTRY	89	88	-1.1	-1
   DC-ACCESSIBILITY	130	128	-1.5	-2
   DC-PRESERVATION	127	124	-2.4	-3
   DC-GOVERNMENT	144	139	-3.5	-5
   DC-GLOSSARY	11	10	-9.1	-1
   DC-VOCABULARY (new)		17
   TOTAL	3,304	3,350	1.4	46
   TOTAL (Excluding DC-General)	3,284	3,327	1.3	43
   Twitter followers	1,834	3,107	69.4	1,273

   While numbers of people joining DCMI lists shows a modest overall increase, the increase in the number of Twitter followers is up 69.4 percent from 2010. we have been fortunate to have the ongoing commitment of OCLC's Eric Childress in overseeing DCMI's steady expansion into social media. With the integration of social media into the developing Drupal website, we anticipate such media being of increasing importance to DCMI's dissemination of information. The membership losses observed in the data likely correlate with the dynamics noted with Table 2.

Raju Buddharaju, Financial and Administrative Officer, Director

1. Mid-Fiscal Year

   The fiscal year for DCMI LLC runs from July through June. Thus, the end of December marks the mid-point in the 2011-2012 year. I am reporting at this time that mid-year income and expenditures for DCMI LLC are as projected with the second half of the year looking as planned.

2. DCMI PayPal Account

   As noted in the December Update, DCMI is establishing a PayPal account to support website financial transactions. Currently, there are two areas of projected use of the account: (1) to support a long anticipated donations programme; and (2) to enable provision of optional registration services for DCMI's annual conference and for regional meetings. After preliminary investigation, the decision has been made for economic reasons to open the Paypal account in the U.S. with periodic fund transfers to DCMI's operational bank account held in Singapore.

   DCMI will be providing registration services for the DCMI-UK regional meeting mentioned by Stuart above (with fuller description by Diane below). We anticipate bringing up the donation programme as soon as we have had the opportunity to vet its details with the Oversight Committee and the Advisory Board.

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

1. Revision of the DCMI Abstract Model

   Recent teleconferences about the revision of the DCMI Abstract Model have confirmed a rough consensus about the role of the Abstract Model as a bridge between the RDF mindset of metadata statements that can be linked and recombined on the basis of formal semantics and the XML mindset of metadata formats that can be syntactically validated. Some participants in the discussion see DCAM, potentially, as a vocabulary of metadata constructs expressed in RDF but usable in contexts that are not RDF-aware. Others emphasize the importance of undertaking any revision of DCAM with a test-driven approach, with examples and test cases in both RDF and XML. One starting point is an analysis of gaps when comparing the constructs needed in metadata formats with constructs provided by RDF (and by the revised RDF 1.1 currently under development in a W3C working group). There is a rough consensus that in order to reach both general readers and more technically knowledgeable developers, any revised DCAM "reference" specification should be accompanied by a more accessibly written "DCAM Primer".

2. DCMI Schema.org Alignment Task Group

   The DCMI Schema.org Alignment Task Group has put into place a version-controlled "Git" repository for publishing a machine-readable representation of the mappings between the properties and classes of DCMI Metadata Terms and Schema.org, as well as an experimental method for systematically tracking issues raised with regard to the mappings. The proposed mappings, still in draft form, will be approved within the group over the coming weeks and published for public comment before finalization.

Diane Hillmann, Vocabulary Maintenance Officer

1. DCMI and JSC: Five Years On

   Work is proceeding apace on the initial meetings of the DCMI Vocabulary Management Community and the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group, in conjunction with the DCMI and JSC: Five Years On celebrations in London upcoming April 26-27 at the British Library. The announcement for those meetings has been widely distributed, resulting in a flurry of new subscribers for the discussion lists of both groups. Gordon Dunsire and I are organizing the meeting and in the midst of finalizing budgets and the speaker lineup for the April 27 seminar on the impact of the DCMI/JSC collaboration and expect to be making additional announcements as those details are finalized. For the Community and Task Group meetings, agenda development on the discussion lists for those two groups will be starting in the next few weeks. The meeting website is up on the DCMI Open Conference System.

2. DCMI Community at ALA

   The recently completed American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Dallas, TX (Jan. 19-24, 2012) was abuzz with discussions on linked data, starting with a full-day pre-conference event entitled Libraries, Linked Data and the Semantic Web, featuring a number of well known speakers associated with DCMI: Eric Miller, Corey Harper, and Karen Coyle. Additional events around linked data included a Linked Data Interest Group meeting (organized by Karen Coyle and Corey Harper), as well as a number of meetings highlighting a number topics of interest in our community.