Dear Aaron,
Welcome to this list. I have in the meantime registered for SWAG and
look forward to moving forward in synch.
I am one of the people on this DCMI Registry list also involved with
the SCHEMAS project (with Rachel Heery, Makx Dekkers, Manjula Patel,
and Gauri Salokhe). The SCHEMAS Project is funded by the EU as an
"accompanying measure" to help EU-funded projects publish, discover,
and harmonise metadata usage. Its target user is a project manager who
wants to design a metadata schema following good practice and standard
usage in their particular domain. To provide this help, we have
prepared overviews of the standards landscape; are setting up a
registry of namespaces and application profiles; and are putting those
namespaces and profiles into context with descriptive metadata and
expert annotations. Since good practice in metadata is global, the
scope of the SCHEMAS registry is not limited to the EU.
We are coordinating very closely on this with the DCMI registry
activity. If the primary task of the DCMI registry is to manage a
specific namespace, we see the SCHEMAS registry as serving a
complementary aim -- that of providing access to adaptations of
namespaces (not just the DCMI namespace) in particular implementation
contexts. From your description of SWAG, I think we all picture such
systems ideally as particular views on an open and semantically
coherent metadata environment.
I'm particularly interested in your focus on a dictionary, as this is
the metaphor I find most useful for what we are doing [1, 2]. I think
of the task as involving the balance that dictionary editors must
strike between "describing" a living language in all its inconsistent
complexity and "prescribing" guidelines for good usage. Putting on my
DCMI Registry hat, I am particularly interested in implementing simple
policy guidelines for the routine peer review and approval of proposed
additions to the DCMI namespace -- the "prescriptive" task of an
editorial board. Doing this effectively presupposes a shared sense of
grammar, and the grammar for DCMI must evolve compatibly with other
grammars of the Semantic Web.
Tom
[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december98/12baker.html
[2] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/baker/10baker.html
On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote:
> It seems like now is as good a time as any to introduce myself. I'm Aaron
> Swartz from SWAG, the Semantic Web Agreement Group. We haven't officially
> announced ourselves yet, but we're moving quickly towards that point. Our
> purpose and goals have been rapidly evolving, but I see ourselves as working
> together to assure interoperability and compatibility between things on the
> Semantic Web (XML, RDF, etc.).
>
> http://purl.org/swag/
>
> As part of this, one of our major projects is WebNS.net a repository for
> schemas and Web data formats as well as a home for XML namespaces. Your
> description of the Dublin Core system almost perfectly describes our goals
> (just remove the DC-specific wording):
>
> > - To assist DCMI to manage the evolution of DC vocabularies (to gather
> > proposals for additional qualifiers, to manage process of approving
> > qualifiers etc)
> >
> > - To provide authoritative definitions of recommended DC elements and
> > qualifiers
> >
> > - To identify DC recommended schemes
> >
> > - To express these 'controlled metadata sets' and the relationships
> > between them in machine readable schema language (see constraints) and in
> > human readable mode.
> >
> > - To provide a user friendly interface to the registered metadata ( search
> > and browse facility, browseable element set lists, links to other
> > information)
>
> We're moving quickly and aggressively to get things done, but we welcome
> assistance from other groups. I hope to work closely with DC-Registry since
> we have so much in common.
>
> > as some of you will know there has been various related activity within the
> > SCHEMAS project where we have been looking at registering schemas in a wider
> > context. (It might be of interest for people to look at the
> > www.schemas-forum.org site to get some background, particularly looking at the
> > workshop programmes and reports).
>
> Thanks for the pointer -- the SCHEMAS work appears to be quite interesting,
> although I don't quite see where it is going... It also appears to be
> EU-centric -- is this true?
>
> --
> [ Aaron Swartz | [log in to unmask] | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
>
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker [log in to unmask]
GMD Library
Schloss Birlinghoven +49-2241-14-2352
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
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