Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Stuart Weibel
OCLC Office of Research Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Presentation Outline
Introduction to Metadata Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Metadata Registries Syntax Alternatives for Web Metadata A Few Strategic Applications
Introduction to Metadata
Scientific Data
Internet Commons
Museums
Whatever...
Interoperability
Structure
human-readable machine-parseable
Syntax
grammars to convey semantics and structure
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The MARC family of standards is the single most successful resource description standard in the world
Anglo-centric
Fixed resources Incomplete handling of resource evolution and other resource relationships MARC 21 accounts for of MARC records, but there are other varieties
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WGs
WGs
WGs
Liaison
DCMI Activities
Standards development and maintenance Metadata registry and infrastructure Technical working groups and periodic workshops Tutorial materials and user guides Education and training Open source software Liaisons with other standards or user communities
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If your software does not understand the qualifier, you can safely ignore it.
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By design not as subtle as mother tongues, but easy to learn and useful in practice Pidgins: small vocabularies (Dublin Core: fifteen special nouns and lots of optional adjectives) Simple grammars: sentences (statements) follow a simple fixed pattern...
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one of 15 properties
DC:Creator DC:Title DC:Subject DC:Date...
Resource has
property
X
qualifiers (adjectives)
"Languages -- Grammar"
Resource has
Date
"2000-06-13"
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Verfasser
rdfs:label
rdfs:label
dc:creator
Creator
[German]
rdfs:label Pencipta
[English]
[Indonesian]
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Metadata is language
Metadata schemas are languages for making statements about resources:
Book has Title "Gone with the Wind". Web page has Publisher "Springer Verlag".
Vocabulary terms (elements) are defined in standards like Dublin Core Metadata grammars constrain the statements and data models one can form
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How can dictionary editors help a metadata language evolve and grow in response to usage? How can this evolution occur across (human) languages?
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Between multiple language renditions of a namespace between terms in related standards between local adaptations and related standards
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Eventually:
User guide interface Support for standardisation processes (peer review) Downloadable input to software tools for generating, editing, validating DC metadata
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EOR Toolkit
Integrate RDF components for supporting search services, topic-maps, site-maps, annotation environments and semantic metadata registries Base-level functionality of this toolkit includes:
Creation, deletion, and management of RDF databases. Ability to infuse RDF instance data into RDF databases. Ability to search RDF databases. Generic interface design capabilities to support RDF applications. Web interface functions as a "metadata browser
Disadvantages
Limited structural richness (wont easily support hierarchical,tree-structured data or entity distinctions ).
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XML DTDs
Works, but DTDs are a stopgap measure
Extensibility is problematic Many ways to say the same thing (too much flexibility) Interoperability must be pre-coordinated DTDs cannot evolve gracefully Granularity is at the level of the DTD
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XML Schemas
Rich XML-based language for expressing type semantics Replaces arcane and limited DTD (origin in SGML) Facilities
Data typing (both complex and primitive) Constraints Defaults
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RDF Components
RDF Model and Syntax WG
Formal data model Syntax for interchange of data
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RDF Schemas
Declaration of vocabularies
properties defined by a particular community characteristics of properties and/or constraints on corresponding values
RDF: In Summary
RDF Metadata transmission
Embedded (e.g. <META>), Transmitted with resource (HTTP), or from a trusted 3rd Party
RDF Schema
Declare, define, reuse vocabularies
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Resolution of overlap and market acceptance will determine the future of each Semantic Web Activity in the W3C Chartered to address such issues: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw
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XML Schemas provide strong data typing, but also supports semantic specifications RDF is focused on semantic data model and extensible namespace management
OAI archives may contain full text or surrogates (metadata) Metadata harvesting protocols
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OAI Metadata
OAI archives will use specific metadata sets and formats that suit the needs of their communities and the types of data they handle. However, interoperability depends on a shared format for exchanging metadata and therefore archives should implement the basic Open Archives Metadata Set.
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Goal: integrated access to subject gateways in Europe High-level agreement on simple, DublinCore-based schema as common denominator
National libraries (Netherlands coordinates) NDR: National Digital Resource in UK Die Deutsche Bibliothek
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PRISM
DC-2001
DC-2001 in Tokyo
October 22-26, 2001
Three tracks:
Technical working group meetings Implementation reports and research papers General introduction and tutorials for nonexperts
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How to Participate
Join the DC-General mailing list Join a working group Create a working group Information on lists and working groups is available at
http://dublincore.org
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