Approved Dublin Core Interoperability Qualifiers

I am pleased to announce that the DC-Usage Committee has completed balloting
of the initial round of proposed Dublin Core Interoperability Qualifiers.
These qualifiers are intended to promote interoperability among applications
that use element refinements and encoding schemes to increase the semantic
precision of metadata.

Principles of Qualification

In judging the suitability of proposed qualifiers, the DC Usage Committee
recognized two basic categories of qualifiers.  It is expected that these
categories will aid application designers in developing coherent local
qualifiers as well.

  1. Encoding Schemes

These qualifiers are pointers to schemes that aid in the interpretation of
an element value. These schemes include controlled vocabularies and formal
notations. A value expressed using an Encoding Scheme will thus be a token
selected from a vocabulary (e.g., a term from a classification system or set
of subject headings) or a string formatted in accordance with a notation
(e.g., "2000-01-01" as the standard expression of a date). 

  2. Element Refinements

These qualifiers make an element's meaning more specific without extending
its meaning. A refined element shares the meaning of the unqualified
element, but with a more restricted scope.

Local versus interoperability qualifiers

Application designers should keep in mind that the present set of qualifiers
is not intended to satisfy all applications, and that meeting local
functional requirements with additional local elements and qualifiers is
expected.  It is expected that as local qualifiers are demonstrated to be of
broader use that they will attract wider deployment and be considered for
adoption as DC Interoperability Qualifiers.

Syntactic Encodings 

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative will issue recommendations in the near
future about syntactic encoding of approved qualified Dublin Core in HTML,
XML, and RDF.

The DC Usage Committee

The DC Usage Committee is a subset of the DC Advisory Committee.  Its
membership, listed below, includes representation of librarians, museum
informatics, digital library researchers, the instructional metadata
community, and system implementers from 8 countries on 4 continents.  These
individuals have invested countless hours since the Frankfurt metadata
conference in a difficult, often contentious task.  Many thanks are due them
for their efforts.

Simon Cox           Renato Iannella     Jon Mason         
David Bearman       Priscilla Caplan    Traugott Koch       
Juha Hakala         Diane Hillmann      Stuart Weibel       
Andy Powell         Makx Dekkers        Leif Andresen    
Roland Schwaenzl    Tom Baker           Rebecca Guenther  
Eric Childress      Stuart Sutton       Sigfrid Lundberg    
Warwick Cathro      Erik Jul            Rachel Heery        
Diann Rusch-Feja    Eric Miller         Shigeo Sugimoto   
John Kunze          Carl Lagoze

Ratification of a proposed qualifier required approval by 2/3 of the members
of the DC Usage Committee who cast votes.

Approved Qualifiers

The following is an informal representation of the approved qualifiers.  The
formal definitions will be released as a DCMI Recommendation in the near
future.  The list is released in this form only as a summary in anticipation
of the formal Recommendation.
		                                 
Qualifiers for 'Subject':

   Encoding Schemes:
      LCSH 	
      MeSH 	
      DDC 	
      LCC 	
      UDC 
	
Qualifiers for 'Title':

   Element Refinement:
      Alternative 		

Qualifiers for 'Resource Type': 

   Encoding Scheme:
      The DCT1 Type Vocabulary 

      Terms in the DCT1 Type Vocabulary:

         Interactive Resource 				
         Dataset 
         Event 
         Image 
         Sound  
         Service 				
         Software 
         Collection 
         Text	
		
Qualifiers for 'Description': 

   Element Refinements:
      Table Of Contents
      Abstract 
	
Qualifiers for 'Format': 

   Element Refinements:
      Extent 			
      Medium 
			
   Encoding Schemes:
      IMT (medium)

Qualifiers for 'Resource Identifier':

   Encoding Scheme:
      URI 	

Qualifiers for 'Language':

   Encoding Schemes: 
      ISO639-2 	
      RFC1766 	

Qualifiers for 'Coverage': 

   Element Refinements:
      Place 
      Time	
	
   Encoding Schemes: 
      DCMI Point   (place)
      ISO3166      (place)	
      DCMI Box     (place)	
      TGN 	       (place)
      DCMI Period  (time)	
      W3C-DTF      (time)

Qualifiers for 'Date': 
		 
   Element Refinements:
      Created 
      Valid 			
      Available 		
      Issued 			
      Modified 
	
   Encoding schemes:
      DCMI Period 
      W3C-DTF 

Qualifiers for 'Relation': 

   Element Refinements:
	Is Version Of 
      Has Version 	
      Is Replaced By      
      Replaces
      Is Required By   
      Requires
      Is Part Of 
      Has Part 
      Is Referenced By      
      References 
      Is Format Of 
      Has Format 	
	
   Encoding Scheme: 
      URI 
 


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