Dear members of the mailing list on Dublin Core in Multiple Languages,

I have been in touch with alot of you individually over the past few
weeks and believe this is a good time to re-start discussion on the list.
First, some general announcements and comments:

--  In July I will move from Bangkok back to the German National
    Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) in Sankt
    Augustin, near Bonn, where I will oversee a Dublin Core
    implementation project from the standpoint of the GMD Library.
    This will be a very supportive environment for pursuing
    some longer-term work on multilingual Dublin Core and,
    more specifically, for collaborating with this Working Group
    on implementing the concept outlined in our position paper.
    I will miss my colleagues at the Asian Institute of Technology
    and elsewhere in Asia but am already looking for ways to continue
    and build on our work from Germany.  I was at GMD before going to
    Thailand, so my older address <[log in to unmask]> remains valid.

--  Last year I worked with Xu Bo, a graduate student at AIT, to set up
    a prototype registry of Dublin Core in multiple languages.  It offers
    a list of Dublin Core in twelve languages, retrieves the selected
    RDF schema from (in theory) Seoul or Helsinki, and displays it on
    the browser.  If necessary, it uses the MHTML Java applet developed at
    ULIS in Japan to display fonts for languages such as Chinese or Thai.
    It is very simple, but it works, and I wanted to propose it as a
    "straw man" implementation to focus our discussion.  Unfortunately,
    Xu Bo had to return quite unexpectedly to China in March and must
    remain there.  Since I do not myself know enough Java to prepare it
    for posting on the Web, I have enlisted the help of Eric Miller and
    of Shigeo Sugimoto and his colleagues at ULIS to check the code and
    help bring this online.

There has been some uncertainty this year about the direction of Dublin
Core, and accordingly I have been uncertain about what we should be doing
in this Working Group.  However, Stu has done a good job of articulating
a direction for Dublin Core (see the April issue of D-Lib Magazine [1]).
Dublin Core Version 1.1 will not look radically different from RFC 2314
(also known as Version 1.0), though some of its definitions will be
clearer.  The Dublin Core advisory committees are defining more formal
processes of decision-making on further developments.  

In the meantime, many people in this group, in the Dublin Core community,
and from outside have told me they believe that the position this group
elaborated through meetings in 1998 remains an excellent way forward [2].

I would therefore like to propose that over the next few weeks (ie, by
30 June), we systematically revisit, update, and reaffirm -- or modify
-- the group's position paper.  The RDF examples need to be checked and
updated.  Our position on the use of English-language tokens needs to be
reconsidered in light of some implementation projects.  The creators of
several new language versions have joined this group since the position
paper was last discussed and may want to raise new issues.

In September we will have a good six or seven weeks to plan activities
for DC7.  If by then we have a "proof-of-concept" Web page that accesses
all or most of the existing language versions of Dublin Core as RDF
schemas, we should have alot to talk about in Frankfurt.

Tom

[1] http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/04weibel.html in the April issue of
[2] http://purl.org/DC/documents/working_drafts/wd-multilingual-current.htm


_______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Thomas Baker                                      [log in to unmask]
                                                      [log in to unmask]
AIT   - Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand
ERCIM - European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics
GMD   - German National Research Center for Information Technology GmbH
DCML  - Working Group on Dublin Core in Multiple Languages 
        http://purl.org/DC/groups/languages.htm
        http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december98/12baker.html
        http://www.ercim.org/publication/ws-proceedings/EU-NSF/metadata.html

Personal : c/o FES, GPO Box 2781, Bangkok 10501, Thailand
Work     : c/o AIT-CSIM, P.O.Box 4 Klong Luang, Pathum Thani 12120, Thailand
Home (11-12 hrs ahead of USA) : +66-2-300-3434
Fax ("for Tom Baker")         : +66-2-246-7030, voice: +66-2-246-7013
Office at AIT                 : +66-2-524-5705, message: +66-2-524-5700



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