reading this another thought struck me
in terms of points 1 and 2 these are quite important....
recently our research assistant did an excellant bit of research on
Monument Status's recorded on SMR's. From the results came a quite
strong point... that there was widely different terminology and content in
our status tables (Exegesis or other systems) .... indeed in terms of other
tables (The National Trust SMR is just as guilty) such as Sources, Event
Types etc we have either added our own or adopted non standard lists
for key items in the SMR. We quickly found the standard contents of the
inscription lists are too generic for users to make decent use of the data.
Has anyone had similar thoughts? I think we really do need to think about
the contents, terminology etc of inscripted lists in a national context but
with a very strong consideration for what users need. Also obviously
we need to look to expand the lists that are inscipted ... Management for
us is a key area that we are looking at right know - hopefully their will be
a number of inscripted national lists to come out of that ..... which yes Ed
should include access, amenity etc.
I agree Ed that it needs to be expanded and re-adrressed. It has become
evident that we seem to have shifted away from interoprability with
some very different terminology and content standards being adopted
throughout SMR's.
Whats everyone think?
Jason A. Siddall
NTSMR Officer
>>> "Lee, Edmund" <[log in to unmask]> 14/June/2001
03:19pm >>>
Jason, Paul,
Thanks for your comments about GIS (and also Neil about images)- I
guess my
reservations about getting into this technical area need to be
reconsidered.
Can I suggest that the following 3-part model for FISH future work is
emerging from discussion:-
1. *Content* standards for text-based heritage information (databases,
metadata resource descriptions etc). This is currently covered by
MIDAS, but
needs expanding (and integration with other existing standards)to cover
additional areas including (but not limited to):-
i)what information should be recorded about historic 'areas' as opposed
to
individual site-base 'monuments' to support Jaosn National Trust
landscape
assessments, and EH Power of Place assessments;
ii)what should we record about amenity / visitor access and facilities etc;
iii)expanding bibliographic, documentary archive and objects type
information to the wider remit of 'resources' with an emphsis on
educational
materials description - c.f. the Metadata in Education Group.
2. *Terminology* standards, again to assist text-based heritage
applications
covering MIDAS and new areas identified above, particularly to assist
retrieval. INSCRIPTION provides a framework for this programme, but
needs
filling out. Areas to consider might be:-
i) Development of new terminologies to cover new areas of content
noted
above.
ii) Development of mappings between existing terminologies to support
searching across different data sets.
iii) resolving issues such as joint management of terminology resources
(e.g. using 'bits' of one thesaurus in another).
3. (the new area) *Technical* standards. This might cover:-
i)heritage sector specific recommendations for the use of propietary file
formats etc for data interchange between heritage organisations (ESRI
shape
files for GIS, JPEGs etc)
ii)development of XML DTDs to support interchange and searching
across
various resources.
iii) development of interchange protocols - a sort of 'Bath Profile' for the
historic environment (see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/bath/).
This is in effect the agenda that UKOLN has for the Libraries sector, and
that mda currently provides for museums. Taking this on may mean we
have to
widen our membership from its current base of data providers to IT
providers
and consultants, and look for more resources than we currently have,
as a
purely informal gathering of interested organisations and individuals.
Perhaps the moral is that our agenda needs to include not only future
work,
but future constitution as well...
Any thoughts?
Edmund
FISH Co-ordinator
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