News from 2008

At its face-to-face meeting in Berlin, the DCMI Usage Board reviewed the Scholarly Works Application Profile and found it to be in conformance with its current review criteria, pending minor revisions. In response to a proposal from the DCMI Libraries Community for a new property "holding location", the Usage Board suggested the use of the existing property "availability" in the AGLS Metadata Terms maintained by the National Archives of Australia; suggestions regarding proposals for properties "date captured" and "version" were forwarded to the DCMI Libraries Community for further discussion.

Sam Oh (Sungkyunkwan University, Korea), Shigeo Sugimoto (University of Tsukuba, Japan) and Stuart Sutton (University of Washington, USA) have been confirmed as Program Chairs for DC-2009, to be held 12-16 October 2009 at the National Library of Korea in Seoul. The theme of the conference will be "Semantic Interoperability of Linked Data". The Call for Papers will be published in January 2009.

"Interoperability Levels for Dublin Core Metadata", published today as a DCMI Working Draft, discusses the modeling choices involved in designing metadata applications for different types of interoperability. At Level 1, applications use data components with shared natural-language definitions. At Level 2, data is based on the formal-semantic model of the W3C Resource Description Framework. At Level 3, data is structured as Description Sets (i.e., as records). At Level 4, data content is subject to a shared set of constraints (as described in a Description Set Profile).

The new DCMI Working Draft "Guidelines for Dublin Core Application Profiles" describes the key components of an application profile and walks the reader through the process of designing a profile. Addressed primarily to a non-technical audience, the guidelines also provide a technical appendix about modeling the metadata interoperably for use in linked data environments. This draft will be revised in response to feedback from readers. Interested members of the public are invited to post comments by 1 December 2008 to the DC-GENERAL mailing list, including "[Public Comment]" in the subject line.

"A MoinMoin Wiki Syntax for Description Set Profiles" has been published as a DCMI Working Draft. Using this syntax, editors can embed constraint information about application profiles into normal Wiki documents and extract this information using an Open Source MoinMoin Wiki tool for display in XML. This functionality is illustrated by the MoinMoin Wiki document for the Scholarly Works Application Profile.

This year's conference and workshop DC-2008, held from 22 through 26 September 2008 in Berlin, was very well attended with 312 participants from 170 organizations in 39 countries. Presentations that were given in all tracks during the event are now linked from the Programme page. DCMI wishes to thank the organizers of the conference Competence Centre Interoperable Metadata (KIM), Max Planck Digital Library, Gttingen State and University Library, the German National Library and Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin for hosting the conference.

The DCMI Directorate and the National Library of Korea are pleased to announce that DC-2009, the ninth International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, will be held at the National Digital Library in Seoul, Korea, from 12 through 16 October 2009.

At the DCMI Advisory Board meeting in Berlin on 27 September 2008, the DCMI Tools Community announced that Seth Van Hooland of the Universit Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, will replace Jane Greenberg as co-moderator of the group. In the DCMI Social Tagging Community, Liddy Nevile will hand over to Eva Mndez of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, and Ana Alice Baptista of the Universidade do Minho, Portugal. Seth and Ana have also become members of the DCMI Advisory Board.

DC-2008, the 8th International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications will open in a few days. Online registration is now closed. On-site registration during the event is possible but only with payment in cash (Euros). See the registration page for the conference fees. We are looking forward to meeting many of you in Berlin!

"Expressing Dublin Core description sets using XML (DC-DS-XML)" by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell has been published as a DCMI Proposed Recommendation for public comment from 1 to 29 September 2008. A related document, "Notes on the DC-DS-XML XML Format", describes the development of the format and its relationship to the DCMI Recommendation "Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML" of April 2003. The Proposed Recommendation supports the W3C specification Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) in the form of an XSLT transform for extracting RDF triples from instances of metadata in the DC-DS-XML format.