Hello there,

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 ]