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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%