1. Metadata and electronic information Michael Day UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ m.day@ukoln.ac.uk

2. Metadata and electronic information Michael Day UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath Final CIRCE Workshop, The Council House, Birmingham, 15 January 1999.

3. 3 Presentation Outline Metadata - some definitions Metadata formats The resource discovery context –Dublin Core –Resource Description Framework (RDF) Interoperability Other metadata applications

4. 4 Metadata: definitions (1) Metadata = data about data … the Internet-age term for structured data about data - Joint NSF-EU Working Group on Metadata (1998) … structured data about data that imposes order on a disordered information universe - Carl Lagoze (Cornell University)

5. 5 Metadata: definitions (2) … machine understandable information about web resources or other things - Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium) Roles: Provides information about resources Supports operations carried out on information objects

6. 6 Metadata formats Diversity of metadata formats and frameworks, e.g.: Dublin Core EAD, CIMI, TEI PICS, RDF MARC GILS, FGDC ROADS http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/glossary/

7. 7 Some examples (1) USMARC: 245 00 Wordnews online $h [computer file]. 246 3 World news online 256 Computer online service. 260 Washington, D.C. : $b Worldnews Online, $c [1995- 538 Mode of access: Internet. 500 Title from title frame. 520 WorldNews OnLine is a service … 650 0 Newspapers $x Databases. 856 7 $u http://worldnews.net $2 http Extract from: Nancy B. Olson, ed., Cataloguing Internet resources: a manual and practical guide, 2nd ed. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 1997. http://www.purl.org/oclc/cataloging-internet

8. 8 Some examples (2) TEI header: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam : the astronomer poet of Persia / rendered into English verse by Edward Fitzgerald ; with drawings by Florence Lundborg [electronic resource] Omar Khayyam [...] Creation of machine-readable version: Stephen Ramsay, Electronic Text Center Conversion to TEI.2-conformant markup: University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center [...] From: University of Virginia Library, Cataloging Services Department, Cataloging Procedures Manual, Chapter XII. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Library, 1996-98. http://www.lib.virginia.edu/cataloging/manual/chapters/chapxiib.html

9. 9 Some examples (3) IAFA template: Template-Type: SERVICE Handle: 871473886-23884 Title: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine URI-v1: http://units.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/safeperl/wuhminfo/p?home.html Admin-Email-v1: wuhmo@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk Publisher-Name-v1: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Publisher-Postal-v1: 45-47 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6PE Publisher-City-v1: Oxford Description: The home page of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, a sub-department of the Modern History Faculty of the University of Oxford, this site provides information on the Unit, seminars, conferences and workshops, research interests, staff, current projects, and the graduate programmes. Keywords: History of Medicine; Medicine Language-v1: English Subject-Descriptor-v1: WZ40 History of Medicine Subject-Descriptor-Scheme-v1: NLM Record-Last-Modified-Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 19:09:16 +0000 Record-Last-Modified-Email: cataloguer@omni.ac.uk Record-Created-Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 19:09:16 +0000 Record-Created-Email: cataloguer@omni.ac.uk

10. 10 A metadata typology Simple Rich Adapted from: Lorcan Dempsey and Rachel Heery, Metadata: a current view of practice and issues, Journal of Documentation, vol. 54, no.2, March 1998, pp. 145-172.

11. 11 Resource discovery Approaches to Internet resource discovery: Robot-based global indexes, e.g. Alta Vista, Lycos, etc. Subject gateways - e.g. ROADS-based services Library catalogues, e.g. using USMARC 856 field - InterCat project (OCLC), BIBLINK Need for core metadata for simple resource discovery and interoperability - Dublin Core initiative

12. 12 Dublin Core (1) International initiative to define a core set of metadata elements for resource discovery on the Internet Six DC workshops (to date): DC-1 (Dublin, Ohio) - 1995 DC-2 (Warwick) - 1996 DC-3 (Dublin, Ohio) - 1996 DC-4 (Canberra) - 1997 DC-5 (Helsinki) - 1997 DC-6 (Washington, D.C.) - 1998 DC-7 (Frankfurt/AM) - 1999 http://purl.oclc.org/dc

13. 13 Dublin Core (2) 15 Elements: Title Subject Description Creator Publisher Contributor Date Type Core elements defined in RFC 2413: http://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/computing/internet/rfc/rfc2413.txt Format Identifier Source Language Relation Coverage Rights

14. 14 Dublin Core (3) DC Qualifiers: TYPE - refines the meaning of elements: –Relation TYPE=IsPartOf SCHEME - associates the value with an externally defined scheme: –Subject SCHEME=DDC –Date SCHEME=ISO 8601 LANGUAGE - indicates the language of the value –Title LANGUAGE=en

15. 15 Dublin Core (4) Syntax issues: Simple DC can be embedded into HTML Web pages –Limited functionality Web moving to Extensible Markup Language (XML) Resource Description Framework –RDF … described as an architecture for metadata on the Web

16. 16 RDF Resource Description Framework World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Data model and XML-based syntax An implementation of the conceptual Warwick Framework Modular interoperability Useful for aggregating the different metadata types required for managing digital information over time http://www.w3.org/RDF/

17. 17 DC in HTML Example of DC embedded in HTML: UKOLN Home Page [...]

18. 18 DC in XML-RDF <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax# xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.0/"> <rdf:Description about="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/" dc:Title="UKOLN metadata homepage dc:Subject="metadata; BIBLINK; DESIRE; NewsAgent; ROADS; PRIDE; Cedars; Dublin Core; DC; Z39.50; WHOIS++" dc:Publisher="UKOLN, University of Bath" dc:Type="Text" dc:Format="text/html - 4847 bytes" > <rdf:Bag rdf:_1="Michael Day rdf:_2="Andy Powell" /> <rdf:Bag rdf:_1="http://purl.org/net/ukoln/metadata" rdf:_2="http://purl.eu.org/net/ukoln/metadata" />

19. 19 Interoperability Problem of heterogeneous and distributed resources Protocols –Z39.50 –Whois++ cross-searching (ROADS) Metadata conversion –Nordic Metadata Project –BIBLINK Layered approaches –Arts and Humanities Data Service

20. 20 Other applications Metadata has potential applications in other areas relating to the management of digital resources: Digital preservation Electronic commerce Authentication Managing intellectual property rights Managing access to resources Content rating services

21. 21 UKOLN UKOLN is funded by the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISCs Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ More information on UKOLNs work on metadata can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/