News from 2007

The Organizing Committee of DC-2007, to be held 27-31 August 2007 in Singapore, is pleased to announce that the Guest of Honour at the conference opening will be Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Singapore's Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports and Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts. The conference program has been updated and now contains the titles and presenters of the Conference Papers, as well as more information on the workshop and special sessions. Please note that the early bird registration closes on 9 July. Full rates apply from 10 July. The Call for Sponsors is still open.

Incorporating resolutions of comments received in the public comment period in April 2007, a revised version of the DCMI Abstract Model has been approved as a DCMI Recommendation. A related specification "Expressing Dublin Core™ metadata using the Resource Description Framework (RDF)" supersedes a 2002 Proposed Recommendation on "Expressing Qualified Dublin Core™ in RDF / XML". The new RDF specification remains a DCMI Proposed Recommendation pending the resolution of issues raised during the public comment period.

Based on work done by Barbara Gorson and subsequent review by a committee of the DCMI Advisory Board, a general presentation of the benefits of using Dublin Core™ metadata has been produced under the title "Making Information Work: the Dublin Core™ Way".

As the result of a five-year review, an updated version of the "The Dublin Core™ Metadata Element Set" has been published as ANSI/NISO Standard Z39.85-2007.

A new DCMI Task Group is being set up for collaborative work on Resource Description and Access (RDA), a library standard being developed for resource description and access in the digital world, building on foundations established by the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). The Task Group, led by Diane Hillmann of Cornell University and Gordon Dunsire of Strathclyde University, is being set up in response to recommendations of a meeting hosted by the British Library on 30 April and 1 May 2007 between people involved in DCMI, the Semantic Web community and developers of RDA. The charter of the Task Group is to define components of RDA as an RDF vocabulary for use in developing a Dublin Core™ application profile. The work will be done through a mailing list [email protected] and a Wiki. For more information, please contact Diane Hillmann.

The Organizing Committee of DC-2007, to be held in Singapore from 27 through 31 August 2007, has published the preliminary program for the conference. Keynotes will be given by Johannes Keizer, team leader for Semantic Standards in the Knowledge Exchange and Capacity Building Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome and Zhang Xiaoxing, Deputy Director of the National Cultural Information Resource Center of China. Online registration is now open. Please note the early bird rates that are valid until the 9th of July 2007. The Call for Sponsors is still open.

DCMI has published a Call for Tender for the creation of a structured document format expressing a Description Set Profile (part of a Dublin Core™ Application Profile) as a wiki page, along with a script for transforming the wiki document into a machine-processable representation in XML.

The official Web site of DC-2007, to be held in Singapore from 27 through 31 August 2007, is now online. Information about the conference will be posted on a regular basis. Organizations interested in sponsoring the event are kindly invited to look at the Call for Sponsors.

The DCMI Directorate has awarded a contract to Mikael Nilsson (Knowmania HB, Sweden) to draft a specification modelling a "Description Set Profile" the core component of an Application Profile as a formal set of templates and constraints on the basis of the DCMI Abstract Model. A first draft of this specification will form the basis of subsequent Call for Tender to design a structured document format in support of formally defined Application Profiles.

At the ELPUB conference in Vienna, a DCMI Tools workshop will be held under the title "Ontologies for Digital Application Description". The workshop will take place on 13 June 2007 and focus on the development of an ontology for the description of algorithms, tools, and applications developed in the context of the Semantic Web and DCMI metadata definitions. The workshop is open for all participants of the ELPUB conference and members of the DCMI Tools community. For more information, see the DCMI Tools Community page.