News
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.
The DCMI Usage Board held its mid-year meeting in Barcelona on 16-17 March 2007. The Usage Board reviewed a revised version of the Collection Description Application Profile, determined that it "conforms" to the DCMI Abstract Model, and is finalizing a formal review. A proposal for assigning domains and ranges to DCMI properties was discussed in light of public comment and is being revised for a further round of public comment in May 2007. The Usage Board formulated responses to comments submitted during a five-year review of NISO/ANSI Z39.85-2001 (the Dublin Core™ Metadata Element Set) held from 23 January to 8 March 2007. Having completed editorial revisions of the Element Set and the Type Vocabulary, the Usage Board is currently preparing a set of clarifications and updates to the remaining DCMI metadata terms for public comment later this year.
Public comment will be held from 2 to 30 April 2007 on two related documents: the "DCMI Abstract Model" and the specification "Expressing Dublin Core™ metadata using the Resource Description Framework", or DC-RDF. In accordance with feedback received in an earlier public comment period from 4 February to 4 March 2007, the Abstract Model has been modified to differentiate literal and non-literal values in order to support unambiguous transformations into RDF from any encoding syntax that follows the Abstract Model. The DC-RDF specification, a DCMI Proposed Recommendation, updates an earlier draft in line with the latest version of the Abstract Model, as detailed in the document "Notes on DCMI specifications for Dublin Core™ metadata in RDF"