A somewhat belated trip report on the Eighth Open Forum on Metadata
Registries 2005 11-14 April 2005 which I attended, and where I gave a
presentation on the JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry
in Berlin.
http://www.berlinopenforum.de/
I was only able to attend the first 2 days of the full workshop (12-13
April) so this is partial impression of the full event.
I did attend the first of these events, back in 1997 at Berkeley see
http://pueblo.lbl.gov/~olken/EPA/Workshop/. That event brought together a
range of different communities with very different perspectives - leading
to some very robust exchanges! The overall tone of discourse was much
more moderate and subdued in Berlin, leading to calmer atmosphere but
perhaps less openness as to the differences between communities
represented there, and indeed less representation than I expected from
outside the ISO community.
The emphasis within the forum is still very much on metadata registries
modelled on ISO 11179 with presentations on the development and
implementation of registries based on that standard. ISO 11179 does seem
to have grown up and has now evolved to a family - including ISO/IEC
11179, ISO/IEC 20943, and ISO/IEC 20944.
- 11179 Metadata Registries
- 20943 MDR content consistency
- 20944 MDR interoperability & binding
I did learn a very useful source for info about ISO standards related to
metadata: http://metadata-standards.org
Bruce Bargmayer of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, chair of ISO JTC1/SC32,
considered the fundamental questions: 'what is metadata', 'what is
terminology'. He stated the ambition 'to process data and concepts based
on context and relationships' and discussed the potential for a registry
'metamodel' which would enable registration of more complex 'metadata
structures' and relationships between data elements. There was focus on
considering registration of terminologies and ontologies.
Christian Galanski stated the position from his perspective as secretary
of ISO TC 37/SC 4 the ISO committee responsible for 'Standardization of
principles, methods and applications relating to terminology and other
language and content resources in the contexts of multilingual
communication and cultural diversity'. Christian considered how the
terminology community might work with the metadata community, quite a few
mentions of federated registries which is of interest in relation to DCMI
registries, and also in relation to discussions about federated service
regsitries.
Sam Chance, US Dept of Defense, considered the problem area facing the
DoD, in particular the need for m2m querying and potential for 'partial
understanding' which might be offered by a registry that defined
relationships. He gave an overview of the XMDR project
(seehttp://xmdr.org/) which is taking forward ISO 11179 to
- Register Complex Metadata Structures (Concept Systems, Terminologies)
- Record Correlations and Interrelations Between
- Concept Systems and Data (e.g., Data Elements, Permissible
Values & Value Domains)
- Concept Systems themselves
There were many more presentations (too many!) available from
http://www.berlinopenforum.de/download.html. Worth highlighting are
those by Gerhard Budin looking at metadata issues related to
E-Learning and Cultural Diversity Management; Klaus-Dirk Schmitz on the
(lack of) cultural diversity of icons in user interfaces; Alistair Miles
on SKOS.
My personal impressions:
- very little mention of role of schemas during the forum, reflects focus
on data elements rather than on 'metadata vocabularies', in fact no
acknowledgement of 'vocabularies' outside knowledge organization systems.
However I note the XMDR considers DCMI, MARC and MODS as 'bibliographic
ontologies'. Can we learn from this in DL world, is there too much focus
within digital library world on such 'metadata vocabularies' , might
useful services be built in the DL arena at the 'term' level i.e. can we
get around idiosyncratic models of specialized vocabularies by focusing on
terms?
- Related to this can 'data concept' be used to assist
interoperability between DL metadata - this was used back in the DESIRE
registry for mapping see
http://desire.ukoln.ac.uk/registry/docs/datamodel.html
- there is now some acknowledgement of the benefits of Semantic Web within
ISO 11179 community, (particularly within the XMDR project), but will
encompassing SW technologies be possible without major changes in
their approach? outcomes of XMDR project will be interesting...
- the main players in ISO 11179 are still mostly in the USA and large
scale (DoD, EPA, DOE, NCI, USGS) . There does not seem to be much
communication/collaboration with other initiatives - except for the
forum of course! Maybe understandable for a variety of reasons of funding,
effort etc, but regrettable.
Rachel
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Rachel Heery
UKOLN, University of Bath tel: +44 (0)1225 386724
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk
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