Dear All,

as most of you are aware, the European Environenmet Agency is adressing the
issue of metadata management since 1996. With the emerging of web-based
services in the past years, we started looking into Dublin Core as a widely
supported way for discovery of internet based resources. Since we saw the
Dublin Core metadata initiative opening itself to other communities then the
library one, we increasingly build on the approaches.

The situation as of today is the following:
- EEA is recommending DCES for resource discovery in the information
infrastructure of the proposed European Environmental Information Services
- In the above understanding, EEA recommends the usage of DECS for resource
discovery by partners in its network, the EIONET and to other interested
parties
- EEA is consequently using DCES as the metadata backbone of its Reportnet
approach and the supporting tools
- EEA is making use of DCES in its Reference Centre services which are
providing environmental information to the public.
- EEA is actively promoting the usage of DCES in the CIRCLE / CIRCA
groupware which it shares with EUROSTAT and other Commission Services. This
is seen as a contribution to the eEurope / eGovernment process in Europe.

Our main discussons these days are around how to represent semantics in RDF
togetehr with DCES metadata - and the wide array beyond - in XML files.
A second important discussion is on the usage of qualifyers (DC and non-DC).

We will through the coming month provide further links to
- our recommendations
- available tools and documentations

kind regards

Stefan Jensen
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Stefan Jensen                                            Tel. +45 33 36 7232
Project Manager                                      GSM +45 23 68 36 59
European Environment Agency, EEA        Fax +45 33 36 7151
Kongens Nytorv 6                   email [log in to unmask]
DK 1050 Copenhagen   Denmark           http://www.eea.eu.int