DCMI Virtual: Presentations

A quarter century ago a casual conversation at the second World Wide Web conference launched an effort to extend the skills of librarianship -- cataloging and classifying information resources -- to the exploding world digital resources. The result was a workshop series that became a conference series that became a global metadata initiative. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative continues to provide models for resource description and bring focus to both research and practise in the field.

Metadata is an abstraction, a language with a grammar and vocabularies that necessarily emerges in many varied forms across natural languages, cultures, and intellectual domains. This address will recapitulate some of the metaphors that emerged in the community to bridge these abstractions to the problems of information management in the digital world.

Weibel will also explore some of the social engineering challenges of how a growing global community self-organized and, in the current vernacular, “crowd sourced” what grew into a global standards activity, a research community, and many spin-off activities that underlie much of the organization of digital information on the Internet.

There’s a pretty good chance he’ll tell some stories along the way.

Panelists will be from FAO, CGIAR, Land Portal Foundation, USDA and Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences.

In a massively distributed environment like Internet, service providers play a critical role to make information findable. While data providers make available excellent information, hubs collect their metadata and give visibility worldwide. However, the metadata that is being produced and exposed is not always uniformly rich, and needs to be optimized. In the case of scientific literature in food and agriculture, there are certain singularities that make it even more complex. From one side, grey literature is critical, while journal articles are not necessarily the only scholarly communication channel that counts. Secondly, while in other sciences English is the pivotal language, in the case of the food and agriculture and due to the diversity of languages being used, it is necessary to consider multilingualism and semantic strategies as a way to increase accessibility to scientific literature. Service providers have taken different approaches to resolve all this, through expanding the coverage of types of documents and considering semantic technologies as a key instrument to enrich metadata. This panel session aims to discuss the challenges that service providers are facing to aggregate content from data providers in food and agricultural sciences. The five panelists will share their experiences from different perspectives: 1. Ag Data Commons which is the public, government, scientific research data catalog and repository available to help the agricultural research community share and discover research data funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and meet Federal open access requirements; 2. AGRIS at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations with more than 12 Million records about publications in up to 90 different languages from 500 data providers; 3. Beijing agricultural think tank platform which brings together agricultural policy, the development plan, agricultural related reports, agricultural experts data, and statistical data around the world; and 4. GARDIAN, the Global Agricultural Research Data Innovation & Acceleration Network, which is the CGIAR flagship data harvester across all CGIAR Centers and beyond; and 5. The Land Portal Library with 60,000 highly enriched resources related to land governance aggregated from a highly specialized sector.

A panel of practitioner, educator, and researcher to discuss workflows and ontological models in transforming metadata structures and creating digital disruptions for keeping cultural memory live (e.g., archival materials, covid-19 memory).

The Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has defined a set of classes, properties and concept schemes for describing the educational characteristics of learning resources. These terms have been part of schema.org for several years, where they sit alongside other terms useful in educational resource description. The L​ RMI task group of DCMI​ continues its work to promote the use and improve the utility of LRMI metadata in the context of other efforts in education data management. This panel session is intended for anyone interested in describing learning resources using LRMI or using such metadata to create services for the management, dissemination, discovery, use and reuse of learning resources. It will start with a brief overview of LRMI as an introduction for anyone not familiar with it, and will include presentations from projects that have used LRMI in a national context to describe OER, to make curriculum content more reusable, and to match learning resources to learning objectives. We will describe how LRMI is currently being used in these projects, and discuss ideas for further opportunities, before opening for questions from the audience.

Access to image-based and A/V resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are containers for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. A growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and content repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image and AV delivery. IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) has the following goals; To give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to digital resources hosted around the world, to define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories, and to develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.” (https://iiif.io) and with the release of IIIF version 3.0 these benefits are extended to Audio and Video resources. This lecture will introduce the basic concepts and technologies that make IIIF possible and also discuss the underlying linked data standards that makes the interoperability possible. The lecture will be open to beginners right through to experts and will point those that are interested in getting hands on experience to self guided workshops and support from the wider IIIF Community.

Manually indexing documents for subject-based access is a very labour-intensive intellectual process. A machine could perform similar subject indexing much faster. In this series of presentations and demonstrations, we will show practical examples of automated subject indexing and discuss how such systems can be evaluated.

In the first part of this presentation, Osma Suominen will introduce the general idea of automated subject indexing using a controlled vocabulary such as a thesaurus or a classification system; and the open source automated subject indexing tool Annif, which integrates several different machine learning algorithms for text classification. By combining multiple approaches, Annif can be adapted to different settings. The tool can be used with any vocabulary; and, with suitable training data, documents in many different languages may be analysed. Annif is both a command line tool and a microservice-style API service which can be integrated with other systems. We will demonstrate how to use Annif to train a model using metadata from an existing bibliographic database and how it can then provide subject suggestions for new, unseen documents.

In the second part of the presentation, Koraljka Golub will discuss the topic of evaluating automated subject indexing systems. There are many challenges in evaluation, for example the lack of gold standards to compare against, the inherently subjective nature of subject indexing, relatively low inter-indexer consistency in typical settings, and dominating out-of-context, laboratory-like evaluation approaches.

In the third part of the presentation, Annemieke Romein and Sara Veldhoen will present a case study of how they have applied Annif in a Digital Humanities research project to categorize early modern legislative texts using a hierarchical subject vocabulary and a pre-trained set.

For practitioners that would like to learn how to use the Annif tool on their own, there is also a follow-up hands-on tutorial. The hands-on tutorial consists of short prerecorded video presentations, written instructions and practical exercises that explain and introduce various aspects of Annif and its use.

AGRIS, the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, is a multilingual bibliographic database that connects users directly to a rich collection of research and worldwide technical information on food and agriculture. AGRIS has a network of almost 500 data providers that have contributed to the growth of the database since 1974. Considering the high number of data providers and their diversity, AGRIS must cope with several challenges to integrate and ingest data from all existing data sources, like the existence of several metadata formats and different standards in terms of metadata quality. In addition, with the continuous growth of open repositories and the publication of APIs to harvest data, AGRIS has started the process of automating the ingestion of data in its database. The adoption of machine learning algorithms (neural networks) and controlled vocabularies like AGROVOC play a key role in content understanding and classification of high-volume data, allowing correct data discovery and integration. Intended audience: librarians, information managers, anyone who wants to contribute to AGRIS

The 20th Century Press Archives (PM20) is a large collection of folders with millions of press clippings and other material about persons, organizations, wares, events and general subjects. Founded in 1908 in Germany, the archive soon extended its coverage to newspapers all over the world, kept up till 2005. Today it is a special collection, which is not part of the core business of the owning institution any more. Yet, as the most comprehensive public press archives worldwide it is still of great interest to a broader community. While further-on providing storage and access to the digitized folders on its web site, ZBW is donating the rich PM20 metadata to Wikidata, the free knowledge base backing multiple Wikipedias. There it is put in context and can be improved and enhanced by everybody. That will hopefully boost discoverability and make the data much more usefull. The process of integrating the PM20 metadata into the item and property structures of Wikidata has been completed for the biographical archives and is on the way for the large countries/subject archives. The presentation will touch tools used as well as the Wikidata WikiProject 20th Century Press Archives and community communication.

Digital Humanities is not only the innovation of the research paradigm of humanities research, but also means a brand-new mode of knowledge production and knowledge communication. Therefore, there comes a trend that it needs libraries to integrate digital collections and historical and humanities data for researchers in various fields. As a research-oriented public library, Shanghai Library has a large number of digital historical resources, especially pre-modern newspaper and journal resources, as well as research data and service experience accumulated by librarians and experts from the field of history and humanities. In the past few years, Shanghai Library has launched a number of Digital Humanities projects, using Linked Data, Big Data, visualization, AR and other technologies to carry out datalization and knowledge reorganization of ancient books, genealogy, manuscripts, archives, multimedia resources and experts' research results, so as to support the new human research methods such as data-driven quantitative analysis, visual display, text analysis, social network relationship analysis, geospatial analysis and so on. Based on the existing Digital Humanities projects, the "Historical Humanities Big Data Platform" launched in 2020 integrates human resources of many departments of Shanghai Library, trying to seek new breakthroughs in more complete personnel composition, more resource types, larger data scale, new technology application and better service experience. This presentation takes the implementation of the prototype system of "Historical Humanities Big Data Platform" as an example, introduces the short, medium and long-term goals and current progress of the platform, as well as the methods, technologies and paths used in the implementation process of the platform, and looks forward to the trend and Prospect of the development and utilization of historical and cultural resources and data of the library in the environment of Digital Humanity.

The processing of digital resources in libraries has experienced the development of digitization, modelling, and semantic analysis, began to explore the deeper semantic relationship between the knowledge contained in digital resources. This presentation will introduce the representative practical achievements of the National Library of China from two parts of the semantic organization process: semantic mining and data association. For the Semantic mining part, this presentation takes the digital genealogy indexing project and the newspaper visualization database as an example to introduce the deep semantic annotation technology and visualization model of digital cultural heritage resources; For the data association part, this presentation takes the multimedia-Chinese National Library open online courses as an example to introduce the semantic transformation of video metadata and the release of linked data, and briefly introduces the disclosure platform to demonstrate how to complete SPARQL query and data set download. Finally, this presentation analyzes the key technologies of the semantic organization of library digital resources, points out that there are still difficulties with the semantic metadata standardization, data interoperability and user-oriented knowledge services.

Linked Data (or Linked Open Data, LOD) can be applied not only as an effective method to integrate description-based data from different sources, but also to support digital humanities focusing on image-based content with implementation of other technical standards. This study takes information from the wooden slip relics of the Chinese Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) and the ancient Chinese characters written on them, as an example case to report how the combination of linked data, an integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) can facilitate digital humanities (DH) research, especially for interpreting ancient Chinese characters.

The study is based on the results of the “Wooden Slips Character Dictionary” (簡牘字典系統/ WCD), launched by the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures (ASCDC) as an online system to demonstrate the possibility of integrative application of different ontologies and vocabularies to deal with linked data for DH research. To achieve the aforesaid purpose, the study has developed an “integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology.” The main purpose of the ontological design is to support DH scholarship in the research field of ancient Chinese characters and their interpretation, and also serve as a basic data model for structuring an online retrieval system of Chinese characters across different institutes. The integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology is designed based on the CIDOC-CRM model, which contains four different data models of specific fields to enhance the detailed and accurate description of single wooden slips and the information about each written character. The CRM-based data model is extended to enrich the detailed data on each written Chinese character, including temporal information of work production and annotation for the whole wooden slip or a single character. As a result, the CRM classes are extended as nodes to link with the different types of this integrative Chinese Wooden Slips Ontology. Since the ancient Chinese characters are written on fragile materials and easily become damaged or unrecognizable over time, the interpretation process of these characters has to rely on the support both of images and their metadata retrieval through sematic methods, such as IIIF and Linked Data. To read, recognize and compare writing manners between the same or similar written characters is one of the important methods used to interpret characters accurately. IIIF-based retrieval systems can help scholars to conduct research in a visually comfortable way. While interpreting the precise meaning of a written character within the whole text, obtaining information about the composition or annotation of a Chinese ancient glyph must depend on the LOD-based retrieval approach. ASCDC’s “Chinese characters and character realization ontology” and the “Web Annotation on Cultural heritage ontology” might offer a new approach to analyze this Chinese ancient cultural heritage via semantic methods. To extend and enhance the preliminary research results, images of single characters in the WCD system are further interoperated and retrievable in the union catalog of the “Multi-database Search System for Historical Chinese Characters” based on the IIIF-based API, which is established in cooperation with other international research communities, including the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo, National Institute of Japanese Language, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, and Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University in Japan. The same Chinese characters from datasets of different institutes can be displayed in this collective interface, which supports the study of ancient Chinese characters. Links: 1. Wooden Slips Character Dictionary: https://wcd-ihp.ascdc.sinica.edu.tw/woodslip/ 2. Multi-database Search System for Historical Chinese Characters: https://wcd-ihp.ascdc.sinica.edu.tw/union/

Due to the virtue of resource mapping at a hierarchic level and graph-based representation, RDF data shows promising for data reuse and federation on the Web where both documents and data are linked. There are numerous tools or frameworks used by the Linked Data community, a comprehensive survey, focusing on their objectives, methodologies and most distinctive characteristics, is given in this presentation to gain an overall view of current research trends. Furthermore, Agricultural Information Institution of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science (CAAS AII) has provided a new approach to RDF generation and management in an ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) environment, this presentation will share the plugin developed based on open-source Kettle, which can support RDF schema dynamic mapping and triples transformation for a wide variety of data sources, i.e., the shift from internal or open data in relational databases or files containing structured data such as Excel, CSV, XML and JSON files to RDF data.

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is the data model that allows Europeana to maintain a sustainable aggregation (and publication) of metadata about digital representations of culture artefacts, supporting contextualization and multilinguality. EDM is built in accordance with best practices for publishing data on the web. It is a community-based effort, involving representatives from all the domains represented in Europeana: libraries, museums, archives, and galleries. It was initially defined in 2010 and has been under continuous improvement since, under the coordination and maintenance of Europeana. Building on our DCMI best practices presentation in 2019, we will concretely illustrate how these best practices have been followed in the most recent developments for EDM. We will present the EDM extension for modeling full-text contents and how it supports Europeana’s IIIF API and the viewing of IIIF full-text objects in the Europeana portal. We will discuss the role that EDM, in conjunction with the RightStatements.org initiative, plays for enhancing the sharing of rights metadata across the Europeana Network, especially through validation and interoperability. Finally, we will present how EDM was extended along the lines defined by the W3C Data Quality Vocabulary, in relation with the Europeana Publishing Framework.

One of the most significant challenges in digital humanities research is the archiving, accessing, linking, and analyzing data from many different resources, which is called semantic integration. Semantic integration is the process of using a conceptual representation of the data and their relationships, which is the ontology, to eliminate possible heterogeneities. Ontologies can be used for integration architecture, where metadata from different sources can be mapped and integrated. This paper aims for exploring on the use of metadata and ontologies to develop semantic integration of Thai culture research from different databases. The Thai culture domain is focusing on 'Heet Sib Song' which is the traditional twelve months fesitval that well recognized in the northeast of Thailand. We use the Ontology Development 1010 as a conceptual representation of Heet Sib Song domain to create semantic integration of metadata from different databases and then the data will be mapped which can be used for further archiving and accessing in the future. In addition, the research activities on digital content management and system on cultrual heritages at the Digital Humanties Research Group, Khon Kaen University, Thailand will be presented. Keywords: Ontology, Metadata, Thai Culture, Heet Sib Song, Semantic Integration

Japan Search, a platform for searching a wide variety of Japanese content ranging from published works, paintings, and cultural assets to broadcast programs and movies, is scheduled to be officially released in August, 2020. At the short paper session and Best Practice Day presentation of DC-2019, the National Diet Library of Japan, which developed the systems to operate Japan Search, explained the essentials of the project and gave an introduction to the Japan Search RDF schema, which was designed based on the RDF model with the aim of facilitating the distribution and sharing of metadata. This presentation is intended for librarians and those who are involved with cultural heritage, and will cover the recent improvements made to the schema, with a focus on methods taken to describe information on the access to and use of content as well as information on the provenance of metadata. A demonstration of how metadata from institutions participating in Japan Search are gathered by institutions which act as data aggregators and then transferred to Japan Search is also to be provided.

Canada's Standard on Geospatial Data requires that federal government departments and agencies implement internationally recognized standards that support consistent data management and stewardship, and that increase the interoperability of geospatial information across government. This standard specifically requires the use of the ISO 19115 standard for geographic metadata. As federal departments and agencies worked together to implement this standard, and results were integrated within Canada's Federal Geospatial Platform, small but significant variations began to be apparent. Over 20 federal departments worked together to harmonize their implementation of the ISO standard for metadata, improving overall consistency and quality of metadata for Canada's geospatial data. This presentation will discuss the challenges and rewards of a broad enterprise application this metadata standard, in terms of Canada's experience, and will be of interest to those coordinating or consolidating metadata from multiple sources.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC), along with partnering Government of Canada (GC) institutions, has embarked on a number of pilot projects to transform the way it ingests digital documentary heritage for preservation and access to future generations. One pilot project consists of the electronic transfer of digital archival government records from the GC’s Electronic Document and Record Management System named GCdocs, powered by OpenText’s Content Server. Marie-Claude will provide an overview of the pilot project, LAC’s minimal metadata requirements, and the key role of metadata in the transfer workflow. She will then explain how the native metadata from OpenText’s Content Server are associated to the records, transformed in MODS, and packaged in XML, as well as how LAC uses this information to support its acquisition and preservation activities. This presentation will be of value to all metadata practitioners, especially those looking at ways to migrate records and associated metadata between systems, and those with an interest in digital preservation.

As a part of the report of the CTBTO Science and Technology (SnT) Conference held in Hofburg Palace, Vienna, Austria on 24-26 June 2019. The CTBTO Library has created an extensive analysis of international collaboration through key network visualizations to represent the knowledge transfer of 699 proposals compiled in a Book of Abstracts. In the context of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) verification system, these abstracts involved the participation of experts in nuclear test detection and on the infrastructure that underpins it. This massive event reached the attendance of more than 1,200 experts from international organizations, global policy-making, international collaboration, and citizen awareness attended; with more than 100 oral presentations and more than 300 poster presentations. In this framework, it was needed to represent the complexity of this universe from a different approach to analysis and determine the variety and diversity of international collaborations between: authors, keywords, institutions, and countries. This work was based on the use of the following software: a) Mendeley to create an accurate set of metadata such as titles, authors, abstracts, keywords, affiliations and countries; and b) VoSviewer to design network visualizations to express in one graphic representation its connections. The role of the Metadata during this analysis was crucial, because without the standardization of names, keywords, institutions, and countries. It would not have been possible to represent in one scheme all the relevant information behind each network analysis that expresses how the clusters are interconnected, its co-occurrence, its relatedness based on the frequency.

The presentation shall focus mainly on the use of Dublin Core metadata in railML and is therefore intended for developers or those with experience in the railway industry. It will also contain information on what railMK is, how it works, as well as who makes use of it.

railML functions on the principle of referencing existing usable standards instead of developing all aspects from scratch and it can therefore be seen as an application of Dublin Core. Since Dublin Core has its background in library science, it makes this a great example for collaborative open source work and cooperation spanning across ectors, which might otherwise not have much in common.

Many poor countries are unable to maintain metadata/data repositories for a variety of archival needs. Funding and skills constraints have a substantial impact, resulting in short-lived projects in the best case and non-starters in the worst case. In contrast, some of the more successful projects have avoided popular solutions in favour of simple and low-resource alternatives. This talk will present one approach currently being pursued to develop systems and workflows that closely match the needs of unskilled users without funding and will arguably result in simple preservation.

Taxonomists need to know how terms are being applied to content in order to effectively manage their taxonomies. If a concept that has been tagged to thousands of documents then it may need splitting into more granular concepts. Conversely, if a concept has rarely been tagged to content then it may need to be withdrawn or merged with a more popular concept. Traditional library science developed a methodology known as ‘Posting Counts’ in which a metric is displayed within a thesaurus or taxonomy system to quantify the number of documents or pages each concept is indexed to. In 2019 Synaptica worked with a client who wanted to provide detailed information about tagged content directly within the taxonomy management system. This case study will review a solution in which an ontology was used to create content description profiles and bi-directional APIs were deployed so that when a page of content is tagged with a concept the process also creates a bibliographic record about that page within the taxonomy management system. The resulting solution provides users with an innovative ability to review qualitative as well as quantitative details about how any concept is being used. Links let taxonomists jump from concepts to content summaries and from there on to related concepts and related content without leaving the taxonomy management system.

Library "foreign language" collections are native language collections for certain patrons, and in multilingual societies access to those collections can be unfairly restricted by libraries' choices of languages of cataloging and of access points. Israeli libraries have traditionally ensured access by cataloging in not one but four separate languages: Arabic, English, Hebrew, and Russian. Creating separate access points for each of these languages of cataloging did not solve the problem of allowing seamless access to collections by the majority of language groups within the country. Mazal, the new Israeli national authority file, does provide equal ease of access to all library collections from all major languages groups while maintaining enough connection to international standards of coding and content to allow for interoperability in standard integrated library systems. With the help of Ex Libris Group, Mazal's MARC-friendly solution is available for view within Alma community zone and the underlying structure is being made available for other multilingual societies which wish to allow all patrons access to resources across collections. This presentation will be of interest to those creating and accessing metadata in multiple languages and those interested in decolonizing library metadata.

• Abstract: From May 2019 to April 2020, Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC)’s the Task Group on Metadata Application Profiles (MAPs) worked to identify and understand the issues and practices associated with the creation and management of MAPs within the PCC context, such as defining MAPs in the context of PCC, use cases and requirements, base-model assumptions, and maintenance/governance models. This presentation will share the Group’s findings as well as recommended actions critical to the successful development, implementation, and maintenance of PCC MAPs. • Intended Audience: MAP Developers, Metadata Librarians, Linked Data Implementers

Through the Agri-Nutrition Linkages Technical Working Group, the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture has managed to mainstream nutrition in the departments of Crops, Livestock and Fisheries as well as form linkages with the Ministry of Health. This linkage has enabled the two ministries to collaborate on nutrition interventions. The Agri-Nutrition Linkages Technical Working Group has also brought together multisectoral partners and so far held three (3) successful Agri-Nutrition Regional and National Conferences resulting into several associated documentation linking Agriculture and Nutrition which need to be subjected to online discovery. Lately, in response to the Covid -19 pandemic the Agri-Nutrition Linkages Technical Working Group coordinated development of national guidelines and the 1 million kitchen garden initiative for the country’s 47 counties. This best practice presentation showcases how interdisciplinary collaboration between the domains of Agriculture, Health and multisectoral partners contributing to a common agendum (Agri-Nutrition) can facilitate metadata development for a central online repository which can serve as a metadata harvesting proxy leading to knowledge discovery through semantic web applications such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s AGRIS database and the Open Metadata Registry. The intended audience of this presentation include metadata specialists, researchers and decision makers in the domains of agri-nutrition, agriculture, health, as well as librarians and knowledge management specialists.

Project STAND is an online resource that was established as a centralized access point to bring together academic institutions to share historical and archival documentation on student dissent, collections and materials with a focus on marginalized student identities (African Americans, LGBTQ, LatinX, Asian Americans, indigenous, differently abled, etc), and best practices for archiving born-digital records of marginalized identities. In this presentation, we discuss the various components of creating this portal including Project STAND Controlled Vocabulary Builder, glossary of student activism, metadata schema, site architecture, value of the collections, collection assessment process, and the challenges of site security, interoperability and creating a unified portal in the first phase of this project. We conclude with a brief discussion on the next phase of linking student activism across member institutions.