On Fri, 22 May 1998, ANN LEES wrote:
> On Fri, 22 May 1998, Ann Apps wrote:
> > > b) Should some existing eLib projects be "encouraged" (;-) to move towards
> > > use of IMS? If so, which kinds of projects?
> > >
> >
> > I recently had a quick look at IMS. It seemed that most of the IMS elements,
> > beyond those of Dublin Core, were education related.
> That was very much my impression when I first came across IMS - the
> additions seemd to be about suitability for different stages in
> education
> I suppose that it could turn out to be like AACR2, in that there may
> different levels of descriotion, and you use the parts that are relevant
> to your project/user. (The recidivist cataloguer in me says why isn't it
> AACR2, and cut out the developmental delay ;-))
>
> If it becomes the online equivalent of CIP, i.e. metadata supplied to a
> well-known standard by the information creator/distributor or a trusted
> intermediary such as a national agency, etc, I would expect us all to
> take it into account if not adopt it - another Scheme for RDF, perhaps?
I think this is very likely; it's certainly what the RDF Schema work is
intended to address. Rather than re-invent basics like
title/description/subject, the idea is to define a metadata standard that
lets us compose resource descriptions using multiple vocabularies
simultaneously. The IMS schema in RDF would only need to define the
_additional_ vocabulary items appropriate for describing the
education-related properties of a resource.
In this respect RDF is close to the spirit of the Warwick Framwork for
modularising metadata. The main differences are that RDF requires all
metadata vocabularies to be described using the same formalism (RDF
Schemas), and as a result allows closer integration between statements
drawing on vocabularies from different metatdata standards. This should
make it easier to mix-and-match from appropriate schemas (eg. Dublin Core,
IMS, classification schemas, thesauri etc etc) since a single set of
tools will be able to create, manage and search statements written with
any schema. That's the theory anyway...
Dan
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