dear colleagues,

i'm happy to announce to you that the dc-environment interest group is
online now. you'll find it at http://www.dublincore.org/groups/environ/.

you are receiving this mail through the jiscmail listserver. i have taken
the liberty to do a bulk upload of all participants of the thun workshop.
if you would like to leave the mailing list, please go to
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/dc-environment.html or send me a mail and
i'll take you of the list.

This group is a forum for individuals and organizations involved in
implementing Dublin Core in the environmental domain, with the objective to
establish representation of the domain in DCMI and to promote
interoperability within the domain through the use of Dublin Core. It will
collect information on usage of the Dublin Core in the domain, work on
establishing guidelines and develop an Application Profile for the
environmental domain.

i would like to solicit your help with the three main topics on the agenda:

Survey on usage of Dublin Core in the environmental domain.
Develop guidance material for the use of Dublin Core in the environmental
domain.
Develop Environmental Application Profile.

attached please find what i put down as my motivation towards the dublin
core advisory board to support the installation of this interest group.

i'm looking forward to a lively discussion.

best regards

thom

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the environmental domain is not a very homogenous domain as are e.g.
education or government. rather, it cuts across several fields, touching on
issues of science, government, adminstration, archives and what have you.

nevertheless, information discovery is a key issue in the environmental
community (small wonder) and the European Environment Agency (EEA) has made
a large effort (both financially and organisationally) in dealing with this
issue. unfortunately they came up with a proprietory solution built around
there metadata element set (GELOS). a number of environmental organisations
also went there individual ways, with the result that they can't get at
each others resources without going through a lot of trouble.

meanwhile it has been realised that it would help to agree on some
standards and DC with its current momentum has a lot to offer in this
respect. as a matter of fact EEA is already using DCES to make their
publications available.

due the nature of the environmental domain, it might not make much sense to
come up with environmental specific DC extensions. indeed for quite a lot
of the environmental information out there DCES will probably suffice.

however, the discussion within the env. community showed that guidance
concerning metadata is what is needed. and this is how i understood DCMI so
far. in addition to guidance it offers a forum for the discussion of domain
specific issues. with its independent flavour DCMI is the ideal forum to
bring the international environmental community together when it comes to
information discovery. of course, in the light of the Arhus convention, the
global accessibility of information on the state of the environment has
also a major political dimension.

for me the main issue of this DC interest group is to further the use of
DCES in the environmental community especially when it comes to being
compliant to other domains like e.g. government. environmental information
is for a large part georeferenced information. i therefore see the
additional chance to channel exchange regarding IS0 19115, the
International Metadata Standard for Geographic Information through this IG.

and who knows at the end of the day someone might come up with a missing
element.
~~~~~~~~