All,

DCMI has been experimenting with the use of Wikis for some of its
working groups and I've requested one for use by this Working Group.

A Wiki is essentially a Web site that can be edited by its users.

The DC Collection Description WG Wiki can be found at

http://dublincore.org/collectionwiki/

There are instructions on the site itself: each page contains an "Edit
Page" link which will take you to a form-based view where you can edit
the content. The Wiki uses its own simple markup language, rather than
HTML: again there are help pages on the Wiki itself.

One of the main reasons I asked for a Wiki for this WG is to provide a
space in which we can gather some example collection descriptions
created using the DC CD Application Profile (though it may also be
useful for other collaborative document development) to try to highlight
any problems with using the profile for different types of collection,
at least in terms of data creation.

I've created a page

http://dublincore.org/collectionwiki/ExampleDescriptions

from which examples are can be linked.

And I've created a tabular template for DC CD AP descriptions

http://dublincore.org/collectionwiki/InstanceTemplate

on which your example descriptions can be based. If you create a new
page on the Wiki that will appear as a template on which you can base
the content of the new page.

I admit this is is a bit harder to use than I had hoped :-( I fear the
Wiki markup for the table is a little "dense" and it does make it rather
difficult to read when you are in edit mode. Or maybe it's just my lack
of familiarity with the Wiki markup!

But essentially the table provides a template for a single
collection-level description.

The first row provides the "resource URI" for the collection.

Each subsequent row represents either a comment/heading or a statement
referencing the property named in the first cell.

And the cells containing the strings

"value string"
"value string (term)"
"http://valueURI"

are those into which data is to be placed (value string as free text,
value string as controlled term, and value URI, respectively).

As an example I've created a tabular version of the test example I
created last week in RDF/XML

http://dublincore.org/collectionwiki/ExampleDescriptionPeteJ1

I've also created an XSLT transform

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/collection-application-profile/2005
-03-19/xslt/wiki2rdfx.xsl

which will take as input a page created using that template (actually
the result of transforming it from HTML/SGML to XHTML using HTML Tidy)
and generate an RDF/XML representation of the description.

That transform is something of a blunt instrument, but it does provide a
basis for getting the data from the human-readable Wiki pages into a
machine processable form - though it is highly dependent on the examples
using the structure of the template.

So.... if you think this is useful, please feel free to register with
the Wiki and use the template to create some example descriptions.

(If that tabular template really is too complex to use, I'll try to
create a simpler one. But having the data in a highly structured form
does provide the basis for "scraping" it into other representations
later.)

Cheers

Pete

-------
Pete Johnston
Research Officer (Interoperability)
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
tel: +44 (0)1225 383619    fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/