> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Douglas Watson [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 1998 10:08 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Dublin Core versus GILS
>
> Hello met2 listservers:
> I am working under contract for a Canadian federal department. I am
> trying to locate
> information on the pros and cons of the use of Dublin Core vs. GILS
> for the creation
> of metadata to be inserted in the department's web site. I have
> looked at the DC
> home page, the DC-5 web site, and the web site on the latest project
> by the Australian
> government that is using DC.
> I got some excellent listserv responses from another listserv dealing
> with Australian
> metadata.
>
> Am I right in thinking that DC can be mapped to MARC and GILS, but
> that it is not
> as mappable as GILS.
>
[Weibel,Stu] My understanding of GILS semantics is that they
are largely based on MARC/AACR2, and hence mapping between them should
be straightforward. DC semantics have been mapped to MARC by Rebecca
Guenther at the Library of Congress, and she is perhaps the best person
to comment on the differences.
>
> Am I also right in thinking that at the moment DC is not as
> Z39.50 compliant as GILS.
>
[Weibel,Stu] Dublin Core elements have attracted considerable
attention in the Z39.50 community and are being included in the BIB-1
attribute set.
> Am I also right in assuming that although GILS is a lot
> more complicated, it is superior in terms of being able to describe
> information more
> fully.
>
[Weibel,Stu] There are potentially many niches in the resource
description ecology. DC and GILS are two such niches, each targetted to
slightly different applications, and there is overlap between them.
Eliot Christian, the major champion for GILS, visited a few months back
and one of the things we agreed about is that implementing DC could be
thought of as a manageable step towards implementing a fully-functional
GILS server. There is no inherent conflict between them.
The overall effectiveness of any resource description strategy
is a compound metric made up of considerations of:
- cost of production and maintenance
- effectiveness for discovery (precision and recall)
- degree of interoperability
- accessibility of the congnitive model to users
- I've probably missed some others...?
I don't think you will easily reach a defensible conclusion on
this multivariate scale concerning the relative merits of GILS and DC,
given that doing so would require far more data than now exists. Given
that there is no fundamental incompatibility between the two, deploying
DC as part of a larger GILS oriented strategy would keep you in sync
with both, and would improve prospects for interoperability with many
bleeding edge resource description projects in at least 10 countries
world-wide.
Please note that I do not assert this interoperability as a
certain consequence of deploying DC. The DC community has a great deal
of work to do to demonstrate operational interoperability across domains
and languages, but I am encouraged that there are many people in many
countries working towards these goals.
> I am very interested in getting some advice on the nitty gritty
> technical
> differences between the two (please keeping in mind that although I am
> a professional
> librarian, I am not a technical expert?) Also, it seems to me that
> with the growth
> of the WWW that DC seems to be taking off while my supervisor has been
> hearing that
> GILS is dying in the U.S. Has anyone heard about the prospects for
> GILS in the U.S.
>
[Weibel,Stu] It is my understanding that the Federal
Information Processing Standard that supports GILS deployment in the US
will expire this year and will not be renewed.
> Your assistance is greatly appreciated,
> James Watson
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
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