On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 10:23:18AM -0500, Diane Hillmann wrote:
> Please take a look at the notes from the meeting 
> (http://wiki.metadataregistry.org/Registry_Meeting_Notes%2C_DC-2010)

Text of the above...:


  Registry Meeting Notes, DC-2010

*Registry Community Meeting at DC-2010*

Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA

Corey Harper ([log in to unmask]) began the session by reporting on a
survey done last year as part of the work of the community’s regional
meeting in the UK in July of 2009 [link?] As part of those results,
Corey described some institutions that were running metadata registries,
including Oxford University (vocabs and taxonomies), Space Telescope and
Science registry, OCLC, DCMI, etc.

Corey’s survey also asked about the availability of registry software
and found that respondents were using 2 commercial and 4 open source
packages. Registry contents included a variety of formats, including CSV
and RDF properties and classes, 7 of 12 of which were multilingual. The
highest demand from registry users was for metadata terms.

The survey also asked what was missing from many of the available
options, with answers including:

    * Export and options for viewing data
    * Ability to harvest content from elsewhere vs. manual input
    * Content negotiation (human vs. machine-readable content)
    * A variety of encodings, such as JSON and RDF
    * Version control
    * Publishing of change sets as feeds 

Corey felt that the next step was to publish an analysis and detailed
findings from the survey. Corey was encouraged to publish the results of
his survey so his results would be more accessible to the community as a
whole. Corey’s slides are available on slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/charper/20101020-harper.

The discussion that ensued ranged over a broad swath of topics. Much of
the discussion moved back and forth from the name issue (does ‘Registry
Community’ really reflect what we’re doing?) to the issues that we
should be dealing with, regardless of our name. The group concluded that
our focus really was on metadata registries and terminology services,
and spent some time discussing changing our name, to distinguish us from
other kinds of registries (content, services, copyright, etc.) but
ultimately decided not to do so, though we might yet develop a better
elevator blurb about the mission of the group, to reflect these
distinctions. As part of the discussion of functions that metadata
registries provide, Diane Hillmann volunteered to make available to the
group a document she had developed called Registries?
<https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AXWcbp-BN9AOZG44ejNnc18zNGRtd2dwMw&hl=enWhy>.


Registry providers in the audience discussed their work and took
questions from the audience.

Diane Hillmann provided information on the Open Metadata Registry
<http://www.metadataregistry.org>, including the change in name from the
NSDL Registry and anticipated improvements in development currently. The
OMR sustainability plan includes working with JES and Co.
<http://www.jesandco.org/> (an educational non-profit and co-sponsor of
DC-2010) with a focus on integrating their current projects with the
OMR. The Registry Consortium is still in the plan, though the start
timing has yet to be determined, and will provide a broader base for
decision making and help with continuing funding.

The strengths of the OMR include: history and versioning functionality
(part of the crucial vocabulary and management functions), open
operation and open source software, activity notification available via
RSS feeds. The emphasis on URI management, using any domain, has meant
that supporting the RDA and IFLA vocabularies (FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, ISBD,
etc.) has been possible.

The Registry remodel is already in progress, focused on the challenge of
Application Profiles (and Description Set Profiles) as well as
cross-vocabulary mapping. Planning includes an RDF instance editor
driven by DSP/OWL to eventually replace the current user interface.
Corey Harper suggested that he would consider proposing a pre-conference
for Code4Lib to install and work with the OMR code and will work with
Jon Phipps on the proposal.

Joseph Hourclé discussed the NASA telescope data, and the challenges
around image data and providing federated search across a variety of data.

Shigeo Sugimoto mentioned the difficulty around making a business case
for fund raising and grant writing purposes. Diane suggested that the
“Why Registries” document linked above might help with this.

Mitsuharu Nagamori discussed the DC Registry and the use being made of
its software to support the Japanese Diet Library
<http://juror.slis.Tsukuba.ac.jp/> (see his paper from DC-2009 on the
project). The DC Registry is searchable, includes DC terms in 25
languages, REST, SOAP, and SPARQL interface. All metadata terms are
written in RDF and maintained by Tom Baker andXu Bo. The DC Registry is
open source and has been in place since 1998, now being maintained by
the University of Tsukuba. The registry running this software at the
Univ. of Tsukuba contains over 75 vocabularies beyond the DC Terms and
their translations.

Mitsuharu was asked how the terms were input and maintained. He replied
that all this was by Tom Baker, and that there was currently no
distributed model of input and maintenance. The language versions each
were ‘owned’ by other groups, and the process and governance issues are
determined by the owner of those vocabularies. Similarly, the non-DCMI
vocabularies at the Tsukuba installation are also entered manually.

From these presentations, the group progressed to discussion lead by
Emma Tonkin of design patterns, examples, and requirements that the
group should include in its work plan for the coming year. Part of the
design pattern conversation discussed the range of implementation
options, from very simple and lightweight solutions such as web pages or
spreadsheets documenting metadata vocabularies, to more robust but still
light-weight registries such as the software described by Mitsuharu, to
the much more robust services offered by the OMR. Depending on hosting
models and institutional needs, these represent a wide spectrum of
implementation options.

The To Do list:

    * Business cases
          o good arguments and examples
          o Diane's text in google docs (see above) 
    * Functional requirements for management tools and services
    * Comparison/inventory of tools (in cooperation with DC tools)
    * DC provenance - present use case for registry provenance
    * Registry Standards: interoperability
    * Sharing and storing vocabularies and ontologies - requirements
    * Webinars, activities, regional meetings
    * Registry: do we need a new name for what this is?
    * Preservation and curation - Work with DC Preservation Community? 

Emma suggested that the group take a look at the wiki containing the
earlier work on distributed registries
<http://wiki.metadataregistry.org/DCMI_registry_community> and consider
how we can build on what is there (we need a link from the Registry
Community site on http://dublincore.org).

The remainder of the time was spent brainstorming, starting with the
naming problem. All present agreed that ‘terminology services’ could be
a part of a new name, but concluded that we would need to maintain the
idea of ‘registries’ in a new name (partly for historical reasons). Some
suggestions:

    * Terminology, registries and services?
    * Terminologies
    * Registries
    * Schemas
    * Structures
    * Metadata services
    * Ontologies and semantic web
    * Encoding schemes
          o classes
          o properties 
    * Value Domains 

It was finally determined to leave this discussion alone for now and
focus on a scope description (a couple of paragraphs at most) about what
this community is and is not.

Brainstorming continued on a list of functional requirements, including:

    * Version control
    * Import/export
    * User management (owners and end users, including trust issues)
    * Provenance metadata
    * Notification (end users and owners)
    * Vocabulary mapping (identifying external events such as discovery,
      including notification of mapping assertions and bilateral
      endorsements)
    * Authentication and authority (to allow mapping external to the
      vocabulary)
    * Tracking and exposing usage data
    * Language support
    * Social networking supporting and vocabulary development
    * Storage and display
    * Discovery across registries
    * Web services and /APIs 

[Thanks to Leigh Bain for her excellent notes!]

Notes edited by Diane Hillmann and Corey Harper

Retrieved from
"http://wiki.metadataregistry.org/Registry_Meeting_Notes%2C_DC-2010"


-- 
Thomas Baker <[log in to unmask]>