DCMI Subject and Description Metadata Working Group

Name:	DCMI Subject and Description Metadata Working Group
Type:	Working Group
Status:	Finished
Charter:	Review RFC 2413 and propose appropriate corrections and clarifications. The working group should review the RFC 2413 definition for the SUBJECT and DESCRIPTION elements, and propose any corrections and clarifications for a revision of RFC 2413. The resulting proposal should include proposed rewording of the definition and the reasoning to support the change, as well as important counter arguments that emerge from the mailing list discussions. All such recommendations should be made with the objective of enhancing clarity while minimizing impact on existing applications. Working group members should avoid proposing changes without clear evidence that such changes will correct errors or improve the understandability previously agreed upon Dublin Core semantics. This task is of the highest priority and should be completed within 4 weeks of establishing the working group. Recommend qualifier semantics for elements covered by the working group. Working groups will solicit from implementers recommendations concerning qualifier semantics for SUBJECT and DESCRIPTION and LANGUAGE that have been found to be useful in existing applications, and judged to be potentially useful for a broad range of Dublin Core applications (and hence, important to promote interoperability). These recommendations should be consolidated, discussed on the list, and integrated into a syntax-independent prose recommendation. Working groups should attempt to identify qualifier semantics (from existing and proposed applications) that might have general usefulness for Dublin Core applications. Implicit in the charge of these Working Groups is the recognition that many schemes and controlled vocabularies already exist and can be used in the existing infrastructure (an example of this is the ISO 8601 Date profile that has been agreed upon for encoding Dublin Core dates). Target dates for deliverables will be negotiated with the DC Directorate, balancing the need for thorough discussions on the one hand and the need for timely progression the other. Scheduling the deliverables will help to avoid the collision of many working group reports on the dc-general list at one time
Moderator/Chair:	Cecilia Preston Rachel Heery
Established:	1998-11-04

History

Date constituted: 1998-11-04
Date deactivated: 2000-10-06