Metadata practice and direction: a community perspective

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Metadata practice and directiona community
perspective

• Lorcan Dempsey
• VP Research and Chief Strategist
• NISO Workshop Metadata Practices on the Cutting
  Edge. Washington, May 20 2004.

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Overview
Metadata
Practice
Community
Directions
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Metadata
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Metadata?
Schematized
statements about
resources
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Metadata supports operations on resources .

• Know what resources are available
• Know how to play a resource
• Know provenance of a resource
• Know what use policy governs a resource
• Know how to ingest a resource
• Know how to interact with a resource
• Know how to compose/decompose resources

and relieves the user of having to have
advance knowledge of the characteristics or
existence of the resource.
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Metadata?
allows people and machines to work smarter
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In network space metadata will be associated with
everything that moves

• Multiple types of information Objects
• Collections
• Services
• People
• Organizations
• Places
• Terms
• Formats
• Rights

• and will support multiple operations
• An example a library portal ?

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A portal example
Common services
I need a few references
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
authentication
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Directory user profile
Common services
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Query broker
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Directory service description
Common services
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Content results list
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Id like to get this book.
Request broker
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Directory ILL policy
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Directory service description
Common services
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Content circ/ILL system
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
I need this article too.
Request broker
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
openURL resolver
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Directory local knowledge base
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Nearly there
Common services
Directory service description
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Common services
Content article
Content services
Application services
Presentation services
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Directory user profile
Directory service description
Directory ILL policy
Authentication
Common services
Directory local knowledge base
Reference db
OpenURL resolver
Circ/ILL system
Article db

• Metadata for multiple entities required to
  support operations.
• This picture could be extended in multiple ways.

Request broker
Content services
Query broker
Application services
Presentation services
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Community
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Community?




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Community politics

• Different
• World views
• Requirements
• Traditions
• Legacies
• Experience

• Techeology
• Technology as ideology
• Communities coming together in new shared space
• Boundary confusion
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Political and commercial skin at risk

Ontology recapitulatesideology
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Practice
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Simple descriptive metadata!!
Cataloging rulesControlled vocabs.
FRBRINDECSCIDOC
MARC21 DC VRA CoreMODSOnix
RDF
XML ISO2709
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Interoperability a factor at all these levels ..
For example ..

• Encoding
• Element set
• Content/values

• Encoding
• Element set
• Content/values

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The interoperable core and communities of
practice?
DC-Ed
MODS
MARC 21
SCORM
LOM
MARC XML
GEM
Dublin Core
Dublin Core
ONIX
Godby, Smith and Childress
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Different classes of metadata increasingly a part
of complex object models

• Descriptive
• Structural
• Technical
• Administrative
• Rights
• Preservation
• Tracking
• Provenance

• SCORM
• METS
• MPEG 21

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Directions
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Makers and takers in a time of rapid development

• Makers
• Looking over the horizon
• A clean slate
• At the center of their world
• A moving target
• Religious differences

• Takers
• Focus on here and now
• Manage legacy environments
• Multiple systems and services and priorities
• Want stability
• Secular pragmatism

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Interoperability is an economic and service issue

• Extract maximum value from investment in
• Data (metadata and content)
• Services
• By ensuring that they are
• Sharable
• Reusable
• Recombinable

• Remember
• Element set
• Encoding
• Value spaces

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Cost

• Pressures
• Manage in a world of resource abundance
• Demonstrate value

• Issues
• Programmatically promote metadata from resources
  where possible
• Assess where intellectual contribution justified
• Increasingly complex relationships between
  resources
• Bringing together metadata from different policy
  regimes

Fragmentation of community agreements and
standards activities?
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Statements

• Trust
• Inference

• Annotation, review, commentary

So what about the Semantic Web then?
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Metadata

• Schematized statements about resources
• Historically independent communities of interest
  overlapping in a network space
• Practitioners faced with high acronymic density,
  many choices, and often a moving target
• Kaleidoscopic perspective .. May fall into
  pattern at any minute

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Over to you
Thank you!
Lorcan DempseyDempseyL_at_oclc.org
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The pattern is new
The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies For
the pattern is new in every moment