Title: DC, RDF, Z39.50, and assorted other acronyms
1DC, RDF, Z39.50, and assorted other acronyms
- Paul Miller
- Interoperability Focus
- UK Office for Library Information Networking
(UKOLN) - P.Miller_at_ukoln.ac.uk http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information
Commission, the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding
Councils, as well as by project funding from the
JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also
receives support from the Universities of Bath
and Hull where staff are based.
2No man is an island
3The University for Industry
Connected Government
Museums, Libraries Archives Council
Distributed National Electronic Resource
24 Hour Museum
No museum is an island
The National Grid for Learning
The Peoples Network
Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network
Cool Britannia
New Opportunities Fund
A Netful of Jewels
Interactive Digital TV
4Standard solutions
The nice thing about standards is that
there are so many to choose from!
5Standard solutions
6So why use standards?
- Benefit from the expertise of others
- Standards are (often!) compiled by groups of very
knowledgeable people and you cant afford to
employ them all yourself - Enforce rigour in internal practices
- Standards are means of asserting control over the
resource, allowing you to manage it more
effectively - Facilitate interoperability (and access)
- Museums hold their resources in trust
- Considered deployment of standard solutions makes
access to those resources feasible for many - A virtual museum for the works of Da Vinci?.
7What do standards do?
- Help identify whats important
- CIMIs Access Points
- Mandatory fields
- Allow for consistent use of terminology
- Name Authority Files
- Thesauri
- Lookup tables
- Enable internal and external data exchange
- Reduce duplication of effort
- Minimise (hopefully!) wasted effort
- Reflect consensus.
8What types of standard are there?
- Terminology
- Roma, not Rome
- Roma is preferred to Rome
- Format
- Miller, A.P. 1971, not Paul Miller
- Discovery/ Semantics/ DBMS
- A gross simplification, and a very big bucket
- Creator, Subject, Title, Description
- Syntax
- ltRDF xmlns http//www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax
gt - Transfer
- ftp//ftp.niso.org/ .
9What is Metadata?
- meaningless jargon
- ora fashionable, and terribly misused, term for
what weve always done - ora means of turning data into information
- anddata about data
- andthe name of an author (William Golding)
- andthe title of a book (the Smithsonian).
10Introducing the Dublin Core
- An attempt to improve resource discovery on the
Web - now adopted more broadly
- Building an interdisciplinary consensus about a
core element set for resource discovery - simple and intuitive
- crossdisciplinary not just libraries!!
- international
- open and consensual
- flexible.
See http//purl.org/dc/
11Introducing the Dublin Core
- 15 elements of descriptive metadata
- All elements optional
- All elements repeatable
- The whole is extensible
- offers a starting point for semantically richer
descriptions - Interdisciplinary
- libraries, government, museums, archives
- International
- available in more than 20 languages, with more on
the way...
12Introducing the Dublin Core
- Title
- Creator
- Subject
- Description
- Publisher
- Contributor
- Date
- Type
- Format
- Identifier
- Source
- Language
- Relation
- Coverage
- Rights
http//purl.org/dc/
13Introducing XML
- eXtensible Markup Language
- World Wide Web Consortium recommendation
- Simplified subset of SGML for use on Web
- Addresses HTMLs lack of evolvability
- Easily extended
- Supported by major vendors
- Increasingly used as a transfer syntax, but
capable of far more.
See http//www.w3.org/XML/
14Introducing RDF
- Resource Description Framework
- W3C Recommendation
- Fully compliant application of XML
- Improves upon XML, HTML, PICS
- Machine understandable metadata!
- Supports structure
- Increasing interest
See http//www.w3.org/RDF/
See http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/ dc/
datamodel/WDdcrdf/
15Introducing Z39.50
- North American Standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.501995
version 3) - International Standard (ISO 23950)
- Originally librarycentric
- Permits remote searching of databases
- Access via Z client or over web
- Relies upon Profiles
- CIMI profile for cultural heritage
- GEO profile for Geospatial data.
See http//www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/
16Z39.50 Challenges
- Profiles for each discipline
- Defeats interoperability?
- Vendor interpretation of the standard
- Bib1 bloat
- Largely invisible to the user
- Seen as complicated
- Seen as expensive
- Seen as oldfashioned
- Surely no match for XML/RDF/ whatever.
17Getting involved
- Cultural Heritage bodies
- Already produce excellent standards within the
community (SPECTRUM, CIDOC reference model) - Collaborate with broader initiatives
- CIMI produced a standard for Cultural Heritage
information and Z39.50 (the CIMI Profile), now
before ISO - Dublin Core used by CIMI, AMOL, AHDS, AMICO, and
others - Good cultural heritage representation on
committees - Rights Management issues from the music/film/book
publishing sphere very relevant to museums - Have a great deal in common with libraries,
archives and others - UKOLN and mda exploring synergies here.
18Some pointers
- Interoperability Focus
- http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/interopfocus/
- Interoperability Mailing List
- http//www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/interoperability/
- Dublin Core
- http//purl.org/dc/
- W3C
- http//www.w3.org/
- Z39.50
- http//www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/
- and the flyers on the table