News from 2012

It is with great pleasure that we announce the appointment of Eric Childress to the DCMI Oversight Committee for a three year term as an Independent Member. The Oversight Committee is DCMI's governing body on policy and strategy. Eric is a Consulting Project Manager with OCLC Research and has been active in the Dublin Core™ beginning with the DC-3: CNI/OCLC Workshop on Metadata for Networked Images (1996). Eric currently serves as an active member of the DCMI Advisory Board and as a member of the @dublincore Twitter editorial team.

The start of DC-2012 to be held 3-7 September 2012 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia is now two weeks away. We are still accepting registrations. It will still be possible to register on-site during the event. The final program is available.

A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Jane Greenberg will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time (17:00 UTC) on 22 August 2012. Registration for this webinar closes 22 August 2012 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC). The webinar will provide an historical perspective and an overview of current metadata practices for managing scientific data, with examples drawn from operational repositories and community-driven data science initiatives. It will discuss challenges and potential solutions for metadata generation, identifiers, name authority control, Linked Data, and data citation. A full description of the webinar can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/dcmi/scientific_data/.

The organizing committee of DC-2012 has published the final program of the event. DC-2012 is part of Knowledge Technology Week 2012. On Monday and Tuesday, 3-4 September there will be two full-day Tutorials on Semantic Metadata. The program for the conference on Wednesday through Friday, 5-7 September includes plenary keynotes and paper sessions, posters, workshop and special sessions. You can show your interest at LinkIn and at Lanyrd. Twitter stream at @dcmi12, hashtag #dcmi12. Registration is now open.

JES and Co. has joined DCMI and MIMOS Berhad in bringing you DC-2012 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. JES and Co. is a U.S. nonprofit and a leader in the deployment of Linked Data principles in the service of education in the U.S. and in linking educational resources globally.

The organizing committee of DC-2012 has published the preliminary program of the event. On Monday and Tuesday, 3-4 September there will be two full-day Tutorials on Semantic Metadata. The program for the conference on Wednesday through Friday, 5-7 September includes plenary keynotes and paper sessions, posters, workshop and special sessions. You can show your interest at LinkIn and at Lanyrd. Twitter stream at @dcmi12, hashtag #dcmi12. Registration is now open.

A maintenance release of DCMI Metadata Terms, published today, now includes HTML markup describing all of its properties, classes, datatypes, and vocabulary encoding schemes in machine-readable RDF in accordance with the new W3C RDFa Lite 1.1 specification. RDFa Lite 1.1, published as a W3C Recommendation on 7 June 2012, is the simplest variant of RDFa, a syntax for embedding structured data in Web pages. A Web page with RDFa provides -- in the same source document -- both the human-readable text rendered on-screen by browsers and the detailed machine-readable representation needed by Semantic Web applications. The publication software used by DCMI for the past decade was modified and extended to support RDFa by Hugh Barnes, Gregg Kellogg, and Mitsuharu Nagamori with help from Manu Sporny, Tom Baker, Dan Brickley, and Jon Phipps. All of the software and data used to generate this documentation is available from an open-source repository on GitHub.

Following the W3C guidelines "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies", documentation of DCMI's metadata terms may now be requested by Web browsers and software applications in several formats. For example, an RDF description of the DCMI property "Title" may be requested as a file in RDF/XML or Turtle syntax, via HTTP content negotiation, or as an HTML page with an RDF representation embedded in its markup using RDFa. Since March 2000, users navigating to the URI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title in a Web browser have been shown a difficult-to-read RDF/XML schema. Browsers will now display a human-readable HTML document, and most browsers will take users to the spot in the page where the property "Title" is defined. DCMI's implementation of content negotiation was undertaken by Jon Phipps with assistance from Tom Baker and Jinho Park. Interested software implementers are invited to inspect, comment on, contribute to, or raise issues about the approach taken, which is fully documented in an open-source repository on GitHub.

A number of the organizations represented at the DC-2012 use a Drupal platform (e.g., FAO and VIVO) or are planning such a migration (ZBW Labs and DCMI). This special session titled Linked Data Vocabularies and Drupal will explore the relationship between Drupal and Linked Open Data (LOD) vocabularies - specifically, how Drupal systems can ingest and use LOD vocabularies and publish data using LOD vocabularies. How does, or how might, Drupal interact with the Agrovoc Vocbench, AgInfra tools, metadata registries, or Schema.org? More information available at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/index/pages/view/specialSessions-2012.

Agro-Know Technologies and the agINFRA Project have joined DCMI and MIMOS Berhad in bringing you DC-2012 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. The conference will offer the metadata community the opportunity to come together to discuss metadata innovation in design, deployment and best practices.