On Wed, 24 Jan 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote:

>
> SCHEMAS helps everyone build vocabularies.
>
> DC builds and manages their own important vocabularies.
>
> SWAG catalogs all these vocabularies and helps them work together.
>
> Does this make sense? If so, how do we move forward together?

Hi,

Well, sort of makes sense :-) but there are a couple of things that strike
me

My idea is that there will be a number of schema registries (or vocabulary
catalogs or dictionaries, choose your term) existing which come at the
problem from different perspectives. Some may want to be scoped by
'content considerations', such as to concentrate on a particular subject
domain (e.g. eduacational metadata schemas), some may be interested in
'publishing' the schemas in use a particular regional area (e.g.
scotland).

These registries will be infrastructural components of a semantic
web, in that they will make available to software and/or humans the
application profiles in use in their scope. This will act to try and
re-use effort in building schema, will one might hope prevent
proliferation of schema by aligning new initiatives to existing schema.

However there will be other registries I would imagine which have
different purpose... the registry maintained by a 'standards agency' to
manage evolution of a vocabulary controlled by a standard (e.g. Dublin
Core).

Then there is the added value a registry might offer by mapping between
vocabularies (this is one of the things we started looking at in the
DESIRE registry and that the HARMONY project is looking at now). This
seems to me only scaleable if one considers particular 'communities of
use', in that the intellectual effort required to do the original mappings
is potentially huge, and the maintenance above a certain scale is
similarly difficult.

Certainly I think we need to work together, and our immendiate concern is
that we need to ensure the RDF schemas we create follow the same
principles, we are finding that it requires considerable interpretation to
express schemas in use in projects etc as RDF schemas (or even to push
them into the data maodel we have within the DESIRE registry).

Rachel


---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rachel Heery
UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking)
University of Bath                              tel: +44 (0)1225 826724
Bath, BA2 7AY, UK                               fax: +44 (0)1225 826838
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/