News from 2013

The W3C Working Group Note Dublin Core™ to PROV Mapping has been designated a DCMI Recommended Resource. The document provides a mapping between the PROV-O OWL2 ontology and the Dublin Core™ Terms Vocabulary. The Dublin Core™ Metadata Terms mapping document is part of the PROV family of documents defining various aspects that are necessary to achieve the vision of inter-operable interchange of provenance information in heterogeneous environments such as the Web. More information regarding the mapping is available at the DCMI Metadata Provenance Task Group homepage at http://dublincore.org/groups/provenance/.

DCMI is pleased to announce the appointment of Kai Eckert as Co-Chair of the Usage Board. Kai currently serves as a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Research Group Data and Web Science at University of Mannheim. The Research Group conducts research on methods for managing, integrating and mining large-amounts of heterogeneous information within enterprise and open Web contexts. Most recently, Kai served as Co-Chair of DCMI's Metadata Provenance Task Group. The DCMI Usage Board serves as the arbiter of DCMI namespaces and other specifications. As part of a general restructuring of DCMI governance, the role of the Usage Board is being expanded beyond its current function in approving new proposals for DCMI specifications and proposed revisions to existing specifications to encompass all specification matters including namespace policy and future specification development. For more information regarding the Usage Board, see http://dublincore.org/usage/.

DCMI is pleased to announce that Marcia Zeng has been elected as inaugural Chair of its Advisory Board and Joseph Busch as Chair-Elect. The Advisory Board is a primary source of expertise informing DCMI activities, serving as DCMI ambassadors, maintaining links between stakeholders in the DCMI community and DCMI, liaising with other metadata and content communities, and serving as a voice of their constituents by drawing the attention of the Initiative to constituent concerns as potential DCMI "work themes". DCMI is in the process of creating a governance structure for the Advisory Board. The election of Advisory Board officers is the first step in that structuring. More information about the charge and membership of the Advisory Board can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/advisory/.

A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Thomas Hickey, Chief Scientist with OCLC Research, will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 4 December 2013 (18:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/H3ccLC). Libraries around the world have a long tradition of maintaining authority files to assure the consistent presentation and indexing of names. As library authority files have become available online, the authority data has become accessibleand many have been published as Linked Open Data (LOD)but names in one library authority file typically had no link to corresponding records for persons and organizations in other library authority files. After a successful experiment in matching the Library of Congress/NACO authority file with the German National Library's authority file, an online system called the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) was developed to facilitate sharing by ingesting, matching, and displaying the relations between records in multiple authority files. Although the most visible part of VIAF is an HTML interface, the API beneath it supports a linked data view of VIAF with URIs representing the identities themselves, not just URIs for the clusters. It supports names for persons, corporations, geographic entities, works, and expressions. With English, French, German, Spanish interfaces (and a Japanese in process), the system is used around the world, with over a million queries per day. This Webinar will cover some of the challenges VIAF meets in dealing with many different formats and approaches to describing identities, the relationship of VIAF to the source authority files, to other identity systems such as ORCID and ISNI, VIAF's approach to sustainability, governance and persistence, and how ambiguity is recognized and managed. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/authority/. Registration for the webinar closes 4 December 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (17:00 UTC).

DCMI is pleased to announce that it has named Michael Crandall as inaugural Chair of the Oversight Committee and Eric Childress as the Committee's Chair-Elect. Michael Crandall is a Senior Lecturer in the Information School of the University of Washington and current Director of its iAffiliates Program. Eric Childress provides project management support for OCLC Research projects and participates as a team member and subject matter expert on various OCLC Research and product-related activities focused on metadata, controlled vocabularies, and classification. The Oversight Committee oversees the policies and activities of DCMI, provides oversight and guidance to the Initiative's managing Directorate and contributes to the development and promotion of the Initiative. DCMI is in the process of restructuring the governance of its Oversight Committee and its Advisory Board. The creation of Oversight Committee officers is the first step in that restructuring. More information about the membership of the Oversight Committee can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/oversight/.

A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Makx Dekkers and Stijn Goedertier will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time on 30 October 2013 (17:00 UTC - see World Clock: http://bit.ly/19EvBJe). One key challenge for e-Government programs around the world has been the lack of easily accessible information about the metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, code lists, and other reference data that provide interoperability among a broad diversity of data sources. The Asset Description Metadata Schema was developed for exchanging information about such "interoperability assets". The schema was developed with support from the European Commission with the objective of facilitating interoperability across eGovernment programmes in Europe, but it is already proving its usefulness in a wider context, for example to describe specifications maintained by DCMI and W3C. One key implementation of ADMS is in a federation of semantic asset repositories on the Joinup server. Libraries that collect government information will benefit if such information is based on a set of commonly used schemas, vocabularies and code lists, making it easier to aggregate information from multiple sources. This webinar introduces the ADMS schema and discusses examples of its implementation. Additional information can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2013/dcmi/publicsector. Registration for the webinar closes 30 October 2013 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC).

DCMI is please to announce that the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, USA, has joined DCMI as an Institutional Member in the Initiative's revised membership programs. As one of the top programs in the U.S., GSLIS strives to be innovative, bold and dedicated to making a difference in the world of libraries, archives, museums, and in the information industries. Associate Professor Daniel N. Joudrey will represent GSLIS on the DCMI Oversight Committee. Regional, Institutional and Supporting members of DCMI are pivotal to guaranteeing the continuing contributions of DCMI to the metadata community. Information about the revised membership programs is available: http://dublincore.org/support/.

DCMI has launched an Autumn Membership Drive that continues through 30 November 2013. Individual Members who join before the close of the Drive have the chance to win a free conference registration to DC-2014 in Austin, Texas. DCMI individual and organizational members support the work of DCMI, participate in its governance, and receive benefits such as access to content, discounts for events, and visibility. DCMI is an organization committed to the development and open availability of the specifications and best practice resources that support a healthy global metadata ecosystem. Annual membership dues by DCMI members play a significant role in ensuring that DCMI continues to advance its commitment to support innovation in metadata design and best practice. To find out more about the DCMI membership program, go to http://dublincore.org/support/.

For the first time in the history of the Dublin Core™ International Conference, Best Paper and Best Project Report awards have been given from among three papers on the shortlist in each category. The Best Paper Award went to Antoine Isaac, Valentine Charles, Kate Fernie, Costis Dallas, Dimitris Gavrilis, and Stavros Angelis for their paper titled "Achieving Interoperability between the CARARE Schema for Monuments and Sites and the Europeana Data Model". The Best Project Report Award went to Biligsaikhan Batjargal, Takeo Kuyama, Fuminori Kimura, and Akira Maeda for their project report titled "Linked Data Driven Dynamic Web Services for Providing Multilingual Access to Diverse Japanese Humanities Databases". For complete information including runners-up, see http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/index/pages/view/awards-2013.

DCMI is very pleased to announce that Infocom Corporation of Japan has renewed its Supporting Member status until 30 June 2014. Please see the Supporting Member section on the membership page for more details. The Supporting Member program is open for all companies and organizations that want to support DCMI financially to continue its work to the benefit of the global audience.