Folks,
Here is my hih-level list of workshop deliverables from Helsinki. Some
of the details need to be polished up, but I believe all the following
can be accomplished by the time the workshop report is published (We
have a January slot in DLib Magazine, and just possibly could get it in
before then).
1. DC-Simple (The Finnish finish)
The time has arrived when we can put the finishing touches on the
Minimalist version of the Dublin Core (DC-Simple). The unqualified
version of DC elements should be finalized once and for all, and simple
guidelinies for application promulgated.
2. Sub-element Semantics
A working group formed to identify DC-sanctioned sub-elements. These
sub-elements are intended to identify the additional sub-structure of
the basic 15 elements that are expected to be deployed widely (and hence
will benefit from formal sanction by the DC community). Preliminary
efforts of this group in Helsinki suggest that the additional number of
sub-elements will be countable on fingers and toes.
Rules and principles of sub-element extension will also be codified to
support addition of local or experimental sub-elements.
3. At this Late Date ...
We are still talking about the semantics of the Date element. A working
group has been (re)formed to explore issues of Date sub-element, but the
good news is that the group reached a grudging consensus about what the
unqualified Date should mean in DC-Simple. As part of these
discussions, it became clear that the requirements for ISO-8601 Date
profile need to be expanded somewhat, which Misha Wolf has agreed to do.
4. Structured Relations among metadata sets
The Relation element has been problematic from the beginning of the DC
effort: there has been broad agreement about its importance, but little
consensus about its intended meaning.
A group at Helsinki made substantive progress on identifying the focus
and purpose of Relation. This Working Group will continue its efforts
electronically and bring forward recommendations for structured Relation
types.
5. Description of non-electronic resources
While DC metadata was motivated initially by the need for resource
description conventions for electronic (Web) resources, it was
recognized early on that extending such conventions to non-electronic
resources was appropriate and necessary. At face value, this goal seems
simple. In practice, it imposes difficulties which have muddled our
thinking about the semantics of several DC elements. Substantial
progress was made in Helsinki towards untangling this problem. The
RLG-Summit Working Group Report illuminated some of these problems, many
of which were echoed in the AHDS report as well (Discovering Online
Resources Across the Humanities: A Practical Implementation of the
Dublin Core).
Undercurrents of this problem ran through many of the discussions in the
Workshop, and the solutions identified have informed several of the
outcomes of these discussions. One of the important outcomes is a
syntactic solution for bundling metadata for original and derivatives
work in simple DC metadata implementations.
6. RDF
The W3C working group on Resource Description Framework (RDF) labored
arduously to produce a preliminary specification for the RDF in time to
be discussed at the DC-5 meeting. The result was enormously useful in
the Helsinki discussions, providing as it does a syntactic framework
into which simple and complex metadata implementations will fit. While
still in a preliminary state, the RDF specification helped to clarify
the underlying data model implied by previous Dublin Core discussions.
By formalizing this data model, many of the difficult problems of
expressing DC semantics became easier, allowing important progress to be
made.
The close coupling of the RDF Working Group under the W3C and the
efforts of the DC community is one of the best examples I know of two
technical communities working in tandem to solve broad-scale
infrastructure problems. It is of enormous import to our progress in
promulgating the DC as a net-wide standard.
stu
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