Greetings
Apologies for the lack of traffic on this list.... 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).I do think that when we are considering a 'Dublin Core
Registry' we do always have to keep in mind how this might fit in with
other registry activity elsewhere. And vice versa, those of us working on
SCHEMAS need to consider how a 'SCHEMAS registry' can complement the DC
registry.
What I think would be useful at this stage is to summarise some of the
issues and get some feedback. Those who were at the DC8 Workshop last
October will be aware that Eric Miller (OCLC) has been developing a
prototype 'open metadata registry tool', named EOR. A new version of this
is due soon so it is timely to consider how a 'Dublin Core Registry'
might be implemented using this software.
I suggest a base outline as follows for further discussion, all comments
and contributions welcome. Much of this comes out of the DC8 registry
WG meeting:
Purpose and scope of DC registry
-------------------------------
- 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)
2. Essential Requirements
-------------------------
- To enable DC elements and qualifiers to be annotated with a status such
as 'proposed', 'recommended', 'deprecated' (these 'status' terms to be
provided by the usage committee)
- Interfaces to enable search by element name, free text search, browsing
through lists of element sets
3. Other requirements (priority to be established)
---------------------
- To register DC recommended domain specific 'application profiles' e.g.
the DCMI Education group application profile
- To register authoritative mappings and crosswalks between DC and other
metadata sets (e.g. ONIX, MARC etc)
- To provide information on deployment (e.g. which services are using
particular domain specific extensions)
- To provide information on best practice, guidelines for use (perhaps
link into the user guide?)
- Enable implementors to submit proposed extensions and application
profiles.
Constraints/Assumptions
------------------------
- We will use RDF schema language in the first instance as this is
supported in the prototype software.
- We do not expect to solve the versioning problem within
the first phase of the registry, otherwise we will never get started.
Issues arising
-------------
- in order to express DC elements and qualifiers in RDF there needs to be
a decision on the namespace model for DC, in particular we will need to
use a URL for each element and qualifier and scheme registered. For
various reasons DC elements and qualifiers are now declared as separate
namespaces, as are DC schemes and controlled lists. We need clarification
on agreed practice regarding DC namespaces from the DC Architecture WG
- in order to clarify process of assigning 'status' to DC qulaifiers,
recommended schemes, domain specific extensions we need advice from the
Usage Committee
......
......
OK, I hope that serves as a basis for further discussion. Also please let
the list know about any other registry activity you know about...
Rachel
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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/
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