DCMI Update
Volume 1, Number 7- July
2000
(A Summary of activities from June/July
2000)
Action!
2000-06-01: The 8th International Dublin
Core Metadata Initiative Workshop (DC8): Call for Participation
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, in conjunction
with the National Library of Canada, the IFLA UDT program, and
OCLC, is pleased to announce the 8th International Dublin Core
Metadata Workshop, to be held October 4-6, 2000 at the National
Library of Canada in Ottawa, Canada.
Previous workshops have attracted librarians,
museum informatics specialists, archivists, digital library
researchers, government information providers, publishers, and
content specialists from a broad cross-section of sectors and
disciplines. Participants are expected to be familiar with
Dublin Core basics and should have expertise and interest
in advancing the state of Dublin Core standards or deployment.
Representatives of other metadata initiatives or standards interested
in liaison with DCMI are also encouraged to participate. (http://www.ifla.org/udt/dc8/call.htm)
News Briefs
2000-07-11: DUBLIN CORE RELEASES RECOMMENDED QUALIFIERS
Press
Release: The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI),
an organization leading the development of international standards
to improve electronic resource management and information discovery,
today announced the formal recommendation of the Dublin
Core (DC) Qualifiers. The addition of the DC Qualifiers enhances
the semantic precision of the existing DC Metadata Element Set.
[More
Information]
2000-07-11: NISO Draft Standard: Z39.85-200X The Dublin Core
Metadata Element Set now available for comment and balloting
A new draft of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES),
based on version 1.1 of DCMES, is now available for comment by
the general public as well as for ballot by NISO (US National
Information Standards Organization) voting members. The NISO Draft
Standard is available as a PDF file linked from http://www.niso.org/Z3985.html.
Public comments are welcome. Links from this page contain forms
for submitting comments, which should be directed back to NISO.
The ballot and comment period for DCMES is July 1 to August 15,
2000.
2000-06-02: Dublin Core Element Set, v. 1.1 now available
in Italian
The Dublin Core Element Set has now been translated into more
than 20 languages. A list of the translations can be found on
the Multiple Languages Interest
Group page. The Italian translation was done by ICCU (the
Central Institute for the Union Catalogue of Italian Libraries
and for Bibliographic Information). http://www.iccu.sbn.it/dublinco.html
ICCU is responsible for setting guidelines and for producing
and disseminating standard National and International cataloguing
rules covering all types of materials ranging from manuscripts
to multimedia documents.
Project and Tool Updates
2000-07-18: Tool Upgrade: DC-dot is now conformant with the
recently recommended Dublin Core Qualifiers
DC-dot, UKOLN's web-based Dublin Core generator and editor (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/
)is now conformant with the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set,
Version 1.1: Reference Description and the recently recommended
Dublin Core Qualifiers.
What does this mean?
- All DC-dot help files have been updated in line with the
DC 1.1 reference description.
- Any encoding schemes that DC-dot assigns automatically to
element values conform to the recommended qualifiers.
- The DC 1.1 namespace URI is used in the RDF generated by DC-dot.
- The DC Type pull-down menu offers values from the DCMI Type
encoding scheme.
2000-07-12: New Project: The Victorian Education Channel
Home Page: http://www.education.vic.gov.au/
(Site is still under development)
The Victorian Education Channel (an educational gateway for the
State of Victoria, Australia) has been developed to integrate
access to educational information and services available on the
web. In particular, it provides integrated access to resources
from the Department of Education, Employment and Training (DEET),
Victoria and associated providers. It also supports discovery
of other resources pertinent to Victorian education. The Channel
is for teachers, students, parents and the community - anyone
requiring information with an educational focus - and covers all
sectors of education from early school to tertiary and vocational.
The Victorian Education Channel uses the standard 15 Dublin
Core (DC) elements and 'audience' as an extra element (as recommended
by the DC-Education Working Group). All elements have qualifiers,
are expressed in RDF, and many have controlled vocabularies or
recommended formats. Elements can be repeated and are not mandatory
although for national interoperability, a minimal set is required.
The DC classification is backed up by a full text indexing capability.
DC records are created using a 'workbench' that combines original
authoring or metadata with harvesting of pre-existing metadata,
in HTML or RDF. The workbench also 'putates' values that the author
can choose to ratify. The records are searched by default or user-structured
searches or browsed.
Searches are complemented by access to the full-text indexes.
Dewey DC has been included as a global taxonomy to complement
the more locally-relevant taxonomies but it is not expected that
all resources will be classified using this facility.
DEET has been actively classifying resources for several years
so the channel is being populated by a combination of imported,
existing records and newly created records. The channel will be
supported by resource authoring, and other systems, that either
contribute to the generation of classification records or use
the information in the records as data for user-specific applications.
2000-06-25: Tool Upgrade: DC-dot now provides support for
the W3C XHTML 1.0 Recommendation
DC-dot,
UKOLN's web-based Dublin Core generator and editor now provides
support for the W3C XHTML 1.0 recommendation.
To use this feature, create your DC metadata in the normal way.
Then choose 'XHTML' from the 'Display format' pull down menu.
XHTML 1.0 became a
W3C Recommendation on 26 January 2000. It is a reformulation of
HTML 4.01 in XML, bringing the rigor of XML to HTML, and can be
put to immediate use with existing browsers by following a few
simple guidelines.
The key differences between <meta> elements in XHTML and
HTML 4 are that:
- element names must be in lower-case - <meta> rather
than <META>,
- empty elements (for example, <meta> and <link>)
must end with '/>'.
2000-06-10: New Tool: Online Dublin Core Extraction Service
Dan Connolly of the W3C has created an online
Dublin Core Extraction Service, which uses XSLT to extract
RDF Dublin Core metadata from XHTML pages. The default transformation
for this form, dc-extract.xsl, converts from the format given
in "Encoding Dublin
Core Metadata in HTML" by John Kunze and produces RDF.
For pages that are not well-formed XHTML, the page to be processed
can first be piped through Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy, courtesy
of the online tidy service.
Connolly stated that he "wrote the guts of dc-extract.xsl
on my palm pilot in Amsterdam after WWW9
in an effort to show how easy it is to
use XSLT to extract RDF from real-world data.
Suggestions, article or item submissions and any comments may
be sent to dc@oclc.org. Deadline
for submissions is the 20th of each month.
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