DCMI Global Corporate Circle

DCMI Global Corporate Circle (Working Group)

Open Issues

Issues raised by participants in the Global Corporate Circle:

• Effective implementation of content and document management systems, portals, search engines, and knowledge management applications. Software vendors do not provide any meaningful Dublin Core™ schema support.
• Generating standard attribute value sets including taxonomy, thesaurus, and controlled vocabularies. Standard attribute value sets would be enormously valuable.
• In corporations, knowledge management and corporate IT are the Dublin Core™ users, not the librarians/information service providers. Applications of Dublin Core™ occur mostly in the Corporate web presence, not the corporate intranet.
• Demonstrating the value of industry standards to the organization. Collaboration is not part of the corporate culture, competition is.
• Identifying the business problems that DC can help solve—
  • Engineering effective content creation scenarios, and adding value to that content
  • Generating top hits in web searches
  • Ensuring document-level security (controlling access)

In addition, a number of corporate user needs have been identified:

• Industry best practice. Case histories of process (and its cost) to arrive at corporate metadata standards. Documentation of opportunity cost. ROI of applying metadata standards (revenue), duplicate storage (liability/IP exposure & cost). Benefits of facilitated, distributed data hosting.
• ISO/NISO validation.
• ROI cost benefits, e.g., studies that show the cost before and after Dublin Core™ has been adopted.
• Validation of Dublin Core™ compliance by vendors. Compliance validation service, recommendation report, or vendor self-validation tools. Bottom line is that there is a need for software tools.
• Input to DC usage, e.g., specialized attribute value lists, Type encoding extensions.
• Dublin Core™ enabled search engines—Alta Vista, Autonomy, Verity, Inktomi.

Out of the discussions, some potential ideas for the scope, future work, and actions for the Global Corporate Circle evolved:

• Development of controlled vocabularies at a global level
• Vocabulary-enabled search services
• Influencing Internet search engines
• Documentation, e.g., on how to integrate a vocabulary with a search engine
• Obtaining vendor subsidies for work from SAP, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, etc.
• Influencing information providers to provide Dublin Core™ formatted content.
• Convening a face-to-face meeting once a year.
• Identifying and working on what's missing but relevant to DC, e.g., a document lifecycle element could become a corporate extension.
• Other potential host organizations are: ITIMG (Industrial Technical Information Managers Group), SLA.