DC Registry WG meeting report DC2004, Shanghai, 2004-10-14 The meeting was attended by 31 people. Harry Wagner presented some slides to help guide the discussion over a number of topics (the slides are available here: http://dublincore.org/groups/registry/dc2004_registry.pdf ). We started with a brief overview of the registry, including: - an overview of the project's mission statement and goals - a recap of our current status - an overview of the application architecture and the technology it is built upon The remainder of the meeting was spent on an open discussion of our prior-year accomplishments, the activity at the distributed sites and a review of the survey results. Prior-year accomplishments: - published a new working group charter. That charter is available here: http://dublincore.org/groups/registry/ - added support for a REST-style application interface. REST is a style of Web services based on HTTP. It is popular due to it's lightweight implementation and ease-of-use. The registry application interface is a collection of Web services. This includes both REST-style and SOAP-style services. - installed a distributed registry at the Library of the Chinese Academy of Science. This registry will play a small role in a much larger project to link all of the Chinese digital libraries. - published an installation guide and an administration guide. The installation guide is available here: http://dublincore.org/dcregistry/pageDisplayServlet?page=install.xsl and the administration guide (still in draft) is available from the link provided in the administration section. There were a lot of comments regarding the installation guide and installation in general. A suggestion was made to add 2 new sections to this document; an efforts guideline that provides detail regarding how much effort and expertise is required for various types of installation (i.e., an out-of-the-box install vs. an installation with various local extensions). It was also suggested that a section be added to address security. There are no security issues with a registry install, but it was felt the document should state this. An additional request was made to review the use of packaging to further simplify installation. - metadata and user-interface translations for Czech, Ukrainian and Welsh were added. - the user interface was completely re-designed to simply use. Functionality that enables registries to add usage examples for terms was added. Additionally, quick-links to different encodings (including RDF and N3) was added. - there were numerous enhancements to the administrative component to simplify installation and support. - the registry was migrated from Jena 1.6 to Jena 2.0, providing additional support for the ontology layer. There was some discussion about the current activity at the distributed sites. Registries are currently deployed at OCLC (Dublin Ohio), The University of Tsukuba (Tsukuba Japan), The University of Goettingen (Goettingen Germany) and the Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Beijing China). Representatives from each of the distributed sites, with the exception of Goettingen, were present and were able to comment on their current activity and future plans. One item worth noting is that each of the distributed sites are using their registry implementations for research, with the exception of registry in Beijing. The remainder of the meeting was spent reviewing the results of the recent survey (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind0409&L=dc-registry&T=0&F=&S=&P=313). While the number of responses generated by the survey was smaller than we had hoped, the information provided proved quite valuable. Survey results indated that the most important feature of a metadata registry was to provide an authoritative and trusted source of information, followed closely by an application interface and inter-registry cooperation. The greatest barrier to installation was determined to be cost. This came as a surprise since the registry is open source. Some follow-up will be needed to determine exactly where cost becomes a factor, or if the question was simply poorly-worded. Application profile generation and metadata crosswalks were rated the most inidspensible new features for a metadata registry and is something that will be considered in the coming year. Where this functionality fits within the primary role for the registry (essentially a resolution service) is not clear. One other item important to note was the number of write-in features for functionality already supported by the registry. This indicates that there is still work to be done in promoting the registry and raising awareness of the benefits provided.