DCMI Registry Community

At the meeting in Singapore, reports were presented by several groups including Jane Hunter's DART project, The European Library, the NSDL Registry and the IEMSR project. We also reported back from the Open Forum on Metadata Registries, held in New York in summer 2007. This was followed by a discussion that focused on identifying similar design choices made by these independent efforts, and the potential for further joint work in this area. As a result of this discussion, it was decided that a Task Group should be proposed in order to fulfil the following aims:

• Develop a set of functional requirements common to current registries, based on the experience and findings of current registry implementers and stakeholders. As part of this, investigate the dissemination functionality considered desirable in a registry, and appropriate use cases associated with this functionality;
• Draft a set of use cases for inter-registry interactions, taking into consideration interoperability concerns (reporting, notification, versioning, etc.) between registries and other applications sharing related goals;
• Draft a set of functional requirements related to the inter-registry transfer language or languages, including interoperability concerns related to sharing information between registries and with other applications such as vocabulary management applications that share related aims.

The Registry WG met at DC2006 in Manzanillo, on December 6 2006. The meeting kicked off with some history and background to the group, followed by updates on various ongoing registry initiatives. The European Library Metadata registry was introduced by Christine Frodl (Die Deutsche Bibliothek), and the JISC Information Environment Metadata Registry, presented by Rachel Heery (UKOLN). The Cornell NSDL Registry team, Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps, gave a more detailed update and demonstration of the NSDL Registry.

The Registry WG went on to consider management of change within vocabularies, a topic of interest across metadata registries. Joe Tennis (University of British Columbia), also associated with the NSDL Registry project, led a discussion on modelling concept change within vocabularies, and how such changes might be encoded using SKOS. There was some lively debate on how the notion of 'concept' was being used, and the validity of distinguishing 'snapshots' of terms and vocabularies from 'versions'. Once again the FRBR model (quite a popular topic within the conference!) was invoked to help analysis, for example in distinguishing an 'abstract concept' from a 'concept instance'.

Time was too short to come to any firm conclusions so I hope there will be further discussion on the Registry mailing list of this and other topics that, due to pressure of time, slid off the agenda. In particular Pete Johnston (Eduserv Foundation) generously agreed to move his topic for discussion, Registries and the Web, to the mailing list.

The meeting agreed that a change to status to 'community group' (according to the new DCMI classification of groups) would fit well with the existing nature of the group.

The proposed agenda fot the forthcoming meeting on Friday October 6 afternoon:

1. Introductions and scene setting
2. JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry : update (Rachel Heery, UKOLN)
3. NSDL Metadata Registry: update (Jon Phipps, NSDL)
4. The European Library (TEL) Metadata Registry: update (Christine Frodl, Die Deutsche Bibliothek)
5. Versioning in Metadata Registries: discussion (Diane Hillmann, NSDL)
6. Metadata Registries and the Web (to be confirmed)
7. Future charter and group activity

The DC Registry WG Status Report – September 2006 Over the last year the DC Registry WG has acted as a focus for a variety of metadata schema registry activities taking place internationally. Although there has not been much traffic on the mailing list there has been exchange of news and pointers to project updates. There have been bi-lateral meetings between the The European Library registry group and the JISC IEMSR (UK), and other exchange of information with the DART registry (Australia), the NSDL registry (USA), and the ISO 11179 XMDR initiative.

Metadata schema registries have a wider scope than Dublin Core, so the Dublin Core processes for progressing recommendations and guidelines are not appropriate for much of the work of the various registry projects. This means that one of the main ‘drivers’ for DC WG activity is absent. Whilst the group has value as a focus point we need to consider carefully before taking on specific work items for the next year. Discussions at the Registry WG meeting at DCMI 2006 will inform future plans for the group.

• Report on previous year's activity from Harry Wagner, co-chair 
• Karen Rollitt' account of the National Library of New Zealand's implementation, experiences and  plans.
• Mitsuharu Nagamori, University of Tsukuba, research on registries.
• Thomas Fischer, experiences with installation of Registry Lite
• Rachel Heery report of the 2005 Open Forum for Metadata Registries
• Rachel Heery review of metadata registry activity

Harry Wagner announced he was stepping down from his role as co-chair now that the planned development of the Dublin Core Metadata Registry had been completed.  The meeting went on to discuss revision of the charter and agreed to continue the WG as a forum for discussion and collaboration between the various international registry activities. Within the meeting there was some discussion on what are realistic ambitions and the following workplan was agreed.

1. to actively exchange information on the development of DCMI related registries
2. to build up a portfolio of use cases (with particular intrest expressed in scalability and versioning )
3. to form a liaison group, initially with the ISO 11179 community
4. to contribute to building consensus on modelling of data content of the registry (DCMI vocabularies, application profiles) to enable data exchange 
5. to expose existing schema data for use as test data

The NSDL metadata registry project has set up The Registry Blog for discussion about metadata registries with a particular interest in controlled vocabularies. This blog will provide a useful forum for joint discussion, see for example a personal account of the Registry WG meeting, and discussion of  the NSDL registry at the November 2005 NSDL project meeting.

Registry Lite Application Available for Downloading

2005-07-22, The Registry Lite application is now available for download. This is an open-source general purpose registry that has been designed for easy implementation. Simply drop the application war file in your application server webapps directory and restart your application server. This application has been tested successfully with Redhat Linux servers and should work for other Linux / Unix operating systems as well (Windows servers may require a minor tweak in the way directories are accessed). Anyone interested in registry software is encouraged to try the application and provide feedback. Note that the registry fully supports vocabularies other than Dublin Core. The only restriction is that the vocabulary must be encoded in RDF.

The application war file and source code are available here: http://wip.dublincore.org/downloads/