An introduction to the Dublin Core and the DCMI Gateway Group seminar, Blenheim Palace, Thursday 28

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An introduction to the Dublin Core and the DCMI
Gateway Group seminar, Blenheim Palace,
Thursday 28 February 2002
Email p.johnston_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.
ac.uk/

• Pete Johnston
• UKOLN, University of Bath
• Bath, BA2 7AY

UKOLN is supported by
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An introduction to the Dublin Core and the DCMI

• Resource discovery on the Web
• The mission and activity of the DCMI
• The DC Metadata Element Set
• Some current activity
• DC in government

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Resource discovery on the Web

• Resource providers have moved into a shared
  network space
• Recognition that users wish
• to refer to intellectual and cultural materials
  flexibly and transparently without concern for
  institutional or national boundaries (Dempsey,
  2000)
• Convergence services for resource disclosure,
  discovery and delivery which span boundaries
• smashing the silos (Cathro, 2001)

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And closer to home.

• When people interact with government they want to
  do so on their own terms.
• They want high quality services which are
  accessible, convenient and secure.
• People should not need to understand how
  government is organised, or to know which
  department or agency does what, or whether a
  function is exercised by central or local
  government.
• Cabinet Office, e-government A strategic
  framework, 2000

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The mission of the DCMI

• To make it easier to find resources using the
  Internet through the following activities
• Developing metadata standards for discovery
  across domains,
• Defining frameworks for the interoperation of
  metadata sets,
• Facilitating the development of community- or
  discipline-specific metadata sets that are
  consistent with the above items

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The activities of the DCMI

• Standards development and maintenance
• maintaining existing recommendations
• participation in formal standards activities
• overseeing evolution of vocabularies
• technical working groups
• Educational outreach user support
• DCMI Web site
• workshop series, other events
• tutorial materials, user guides
• Liaison
• other metadata communities
• Tools, services infrastructure
• liaison with developers
• access to schemas, metadata schemas registry

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DCMI organisation

• Directorate
• Executive Director (Stuart Weibel, OCLC),
  Managing Director (Makx Dekkers)
• Board of Trustees
• cross-domain expert group
• assist strategic planning
• develop community support
• Usage Board
• appointed by Directorate
• ensure orderly evolution of DC vocabularies
• editorial committee, evaluate proposals from WGs

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DCMI organisation

• Advisory Board
• chairs of WGs and invited experts
• forum for technical/strategic co-ordination
• liaison with other communities
• Working Groups, Special Interest Groups
• organised around problem/task areas
• formed/dissolved as dictated by work at hand
• open to participation
• consensual approach
• Seeking to
• maintain open, consensus-based model
• establish maintenance processes that earn
  confidence of stakeholders

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A (very) brief history

• 1994 2nd WWW conference, Chicago
• informal discussions
• 1995 NCSA/OCLC Metadata wshop, Dublin, Ohio
• The Dublin Core 13-element set of metadata
  semantics for Web resources
• 1996 DC-2 Warwick workshop
• Warwick Framework metadata is modular
• 1996 DC-3 Dublin, Ohio workshop
• expand 13 elements to 15 (less text-centric?)
• 1997- RDF formal expression of W.F.
• 2000 DCMI recommends qualifiers

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The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

• Interdisciplinary consensus on simple element set
  for resource discovery
• 15 elements
• all optional
• all repeatable
• Not intended for complex resource description
• initial idea of simple document-like object
• simplicity of semantics, ease of use
• Provides basic semantic interoperability
• across domains, across language communities
• does not provide detailed cataloguing rules
• A set of 15 broad buckets

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The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

• Title
• Subject
• Description
• Creator
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Date

• Type
• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

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The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

• Standardisation
• Europe recognition by CEN/ISSS Workshop
  Agreement 13874 (2000)
• US ratification by NISO Z39.85 (2001)
• to be submitted to ISO in 2002?
• Not a replacement for richer descriptive
  standards
• Can provide 15 windows into richer resource
  descriptions
• disclose rich description in simple form
• semantic cross-walks, mappings to existing data
• export rather than create

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The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

• If metadata is language...
• then DC is a pidgin language for use by
  tourists on the Internet commons (Baker)
• Different resource description communities speak
  different languages
• but tourists learn to pidginise
• Small vocabulary, simple grammar/structure
• Resource has Title An Introduction to Dublin
  Core and the DCMI
• Resource has Subject Metadata
• Not as subtle/powerful as separate languages -
  but useful!

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Extending the Dublin Core

• Does allow for extensibility
• but tension between extending DC and choosing
  other, richer schema
• greater specificity lesser interoperability?
• Improve semantic precision of DC elements using
  qualifiers
• element refinements
• make the meaning of an element narrower
• value encoding schemes
• specify that value is from controlled vocabulary,
  or formatted in a standard way
• The dumb-down principle
• Dublin Core Qualifiers recommendation 2000

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The Dublin Core in context

• In practice, metadata implementers
• combine elements from different sources (e.g. DC
  plus elements from other schemas, local
  elements)
• refine definitions of elements
• constrain use of elements
• Application profiles
• if simple DC is a pidgin, an application
  profile is a regional idiom or creole! (Baker)
• element set plus policies, guidelines
• some DCMI WGs developing application profiles for
  specific domains

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DC and interoperability
DCMI Registry
All Domains
Government
Libraries
etc.
AGLS
eGMS
.
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Some current DCMI activity

• Application profiles
• educational, government, library communities
• Guidelines for expressing DC in XML
• Describing agents
• Recording bibliographic citation
• DCMI schemas registry
• Continued liaison with e.g. OAI, W3C. etc
• See Dekkers/Weibel 2002

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DC in government

• DC-gov application profile
• DC recommended as basis for resource discovery of
  govt information in
• Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, Finland,
  Denmark, UK
• Also supra-national agencies
• UN Food Agriculture Organisation World Health
  Organisation.
• European Commission Interchange of Data between
  Administrations (IDA) programme
• Work item Managing Information Resources for
  e-Government (MIREG) to co-ordinate promotion of
  DC-based framework in public sector in Europe

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DC in government

• UK e-government Metadata Framework
• endorsement of simple DC
• recognition of need for additional elements for
  e.g. records management
• recognition of need for thesaurus/controlled
  vocabulary
• UK e-government Metadata Standard
• application profile
• DC (with refinements and encoding schemes)
• new elements (audience, location, preservation,
  disposal)
• draft version 0.2 now available for comment
• http//www.govtalk.gov.uk/

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Summary

• DC provides simple element set for cross-domain
  resource discovery
• Supported by open community of practitioners and
  theorists
• Widely adopted - but not a complete,
  off-the-shelf solution
• Growing interest in government sector
• Central part of UK e-government Metadata
  Framework

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References/Further reading

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiativehttp//dublincore
  .org/
• Dempsey, Lorcan. Scientific, Industrial, and
  Cultural Heritage a shared approachhttp//www.a
  riadne.ac.uk/issue22/dempsey/
• Cathro, Warwick. Smashing the silos towards
  convergence. http//www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpap
  er/2001/cathro2.html
• Baker, Tom. A Grammar of Dublin
  Corehttp//www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/baker/10b
  aker.html
• Heery, Rachel Manjula Patel. Application
  Profiles http//www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-pr
  ofiles/
• Dekkers, Makx Stuart Weibel. DCMI Progress
  Report Workplan for 2002http//www.dlib.org/dl
  ib/february02/weibel/02weibel.html

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Acknowledgements

• UKOLN is funded by Resource the Council for
  Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint
  Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK
  higher and further education funding councils, as
  well as by project funding from the JISC and the
  European Union. UKOLN also receives support from
  the University of Bath where it is based.
• http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/