MetaLib Workshop Die Deutsche Bibliothek In the Shadow of Brunelleschi’s Dome A lesson in metadata development Stuart L. Weibel Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Frankfurt, Germany October 21, 2002

2 DC-2002 Florence – October participants from 25 countries Conference papers, tutorial program, Working group meetings Corporate metadata track Accessibility metadata track Semantic Web Advanced Development track DC-Government, Environment, Education, Library working groups Developments in Agent element qualifiers, Type list additions

3 Participation in the Initiative Community of over 1500 experts and practitioners from 1000 organizations in 50 countries 15 working and interest groups Libraries, (digital) libraries, education, museums, governments, supra-governmental organizations, environment, commerce, networking infrastructure

4 dc:description What is the value we are creating? –Easier discovery –Better organization –Improved manageability –Greater liquidity of information –A community of social capital investment

5 Creation of Value in the Marketplace of Products Value Creation Process Management Stockholders Raw materials Products and Services Customers

6 Creation of Value in the Standards Marketplace Derivative value created by adopters in applications, data, and services Stakeholders Value Creation Process Management Ideas Social Capital Stakeholders become Adopters

7 dc:identifier What makes DCMI uniquely identifiable (and valuable) as a metadata initiative?

8 The I’s have it… I nternational –20 countries represented at DC-2002 I ndependant –OAI, RDF Recombinant metadata, cross disciplinary consensus Open ( I nfluenceable) –Governance and decision-making based on open participation and public process

9 dc:relation What is the relationship of DC to the larger resource description community, and to other metadata formats?

10 The Resource Grid highlow high stewardship Books Journals Newspapers Government docs Audiovisual Maps Scores Special collections Rare books Local/Historical Newspapers Local history materials Archives & manuscripts Theses & dissertations Freely-accessible web resources Open source software Newsgroup archives Institutional repositories ePrints Learning objects/materials Research data highlow high stewardship uniqueness

11 Metadata Standards in the Resource Grid Books Journals Special collections Freely-accessible web resources highlow high stewardship uniqueness MARC, DC ONIX, MPEG MARC, DC ONIX, MPEG MARC, METS, EAD, DC, TEI DC DC, DDI, IEEE/LOM, FGDC, EAD, TEI, SCORM

12 dc:format[s] The DC community includes many overlapping communities of practice –HTML Yes, people are still doing it –XML More structure, in well-defined packages that look familiar to us –RDF Yes, people are still trying to figure it out (and the SWAD group is here to help!)

13 Pre-coordinated interoperability Pre-coordinated agreements Agreed-upon semantics Agreed-upon structure Agreed-upon syntax MARC/AACR2 –Well established, rich metadata DC and XML-Schemas (ala OAI) –Cross disciplinary metadata language

14 XML Schemas declare the particular element sets spoken by a given OAI Server DC is the base interoperablity element set Discipline-specific schemas are encouraged

15 OAI interoperability derives from one (DC) or more common schemas per server OAI-1 OAI-3 OAI-2 OAI-4

16 Recombinant Interoperability Agreed upon architectures for declaring semantics, with dynamically defined semantics –Semantic architecture DC core elements and qualifiers Discipline-specific extensions (Application Profiles) –Syntactic architecture Resource Description Format (RDF) RDF Schema declarations –Property subclasses inherit attributes of parent classes –Interoperability granularity is at the element level rather than the schema level

17 How to do it RDF schemas declare elements as sub-properties of DC elements where applicable –Eg. AGLS:title is a sup-property of DC:title Define discipline-specific extensions as necessary Cross-application indexing works for common elements (element granularity rather than schema granularity) Organizations retain branding value of their respective namespaces while achieving global interoperability Registered Schemas will promote ability to identify and index related data sets

18 Element Granularity Interoperability DC FAO-AGMES Declared as Subproperties of DC AGLS Declared as Subproperties of DC All common properties searchable as DC elements

19 dc:whither?

20 Brunelleschi’s Dome as a metaphor for technology development Francesco Talenti’s 1366 design for Il Duomo called for a dome that surpassed the architectural limits of his day 50 years passed before the genius of Brunelleschi’s dome would be conceived and executed These people had Faith! –In themselves, and in the march of progress

21 And our lessons… Move forward with solutions as we can conceive them… Have confidence in our ability to surmount the challenges… Remember that the benefit in our efforts is in the quiet, unobtrusive implementation of standards

22 The Core, the Core, the Core The Dublin Core is the dominant standard for cross disciplinary resource discovery metadata on the Internet The semantics of the Core have not changed since DC-3 Stable and useful since 1996 Standardized and widely accepted

23 And More, and more, and more More communities participating More extensions to register More government and supra-national adoption More languages More application profiles More protocols to accommodate More documentation needed to make it clearer and easier to deploy More connections to other standards This richness is evidence of success and a challenge to interoperability

24 Many Challenges - Protocols are moving targets HTML  XHTML RDF and RDF Schemas XML XML Schema OAI OAI PMH Open URLs RSS DAML/OIL

25 More Standards MARC and its many variants IEEE-LOM/IMS SCORM FGDC EAD MPEG TEI XRML ODRML Ontologies METS and MODS

26 Standards creation as an act of faith