DC 2006: Metadata for Knowledge and Learning

Vocabularies

In the paper session on ‘ontologies and controlled vocabularies’, Alistair Miles, CCLRC, presented a novel perspective on SKOS [13], by taking as his starting point not existing models for thesauri and controlled vocabularies, but rather an examination of the scope and purpose of SKOS. He identified two usage patterns for a SKOS workflow of creation, indexing and retrieval, where, in the first, a single vocabulary is used for both indexing and retrieval, or, in the second, two different vocabularies are used by the indexer and by the retriever, with the additional need to tie the two together. Use cases will help to establish the requirements for SKOS, and Alistair presented a hypothetical case to demonstrate this.

SKOS again featured in a presentation by Corey Harper, University of Oregon, which looked at approaches to encoding Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Corey explained his efforts to respond to Tim Berners-Lee’s exhortation to make the content of existing databases available on the Semantic Web, in this case by transforming a MARC representation of LCSH to a representation based on SKOS. He concluded with various suggestions for tools and services which might be built on top of such a resource, including facilitating the use of LCSH (or other controlled vocabularies) in the context of ‘social tagging’ applications.

Other papers focusing on vocabularies included a review of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) registry project which is supporting the NSDL’s requirement for development and reuse of small vocabularies, particularly in the area of education; and use of OWL to express relationships within the AGROVOC vocabulary to support an Agricultural Ontology Service.

The Cornell NSDL Registry team, Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps, gave a more detailed update and demonstration of the NSDL Registry in the DCMI Registries Working Group meeting. Other registry activity updates covered The European Library Metadata registry, introduced by Christine Frodl, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, and the JISC Information Environment Metadata Registry, presented by Rachel Heery, UKOLN [14].

The Registry Working Group went on to consider management of change within vocabularies, a topic of interest across metadata registries. Joe Tennis, University of British Columbia, also associated with the NSDL Registry project, led a discussion on modelling concept change within vocabularies, and how such changes might be encoded using SKOS. There was some lively debate on how the notion of ‘concept’ was being used, and the validity of distinguishing ‘snapshots’ of terms and vocabularies from ‘versions’. Once again the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Information (FRBR) model was invoked to help analysis, for example in distinguishing an ‘abstract concept’ from a ‘concept instance’. Time was too short to come to any conclusions, there will be further discussion on the Registry mailing list of this and other topics that, due to pressure of time, slid off the agenda.

Application Experience

Implementations

A paper session on implementations gave an opportunity to learn how Dublin Core is being used ‘in the wild’. Papers from implementers provide valuable insights into the ways DC can be used to meet requirements.

Chiung-min Tsai, National Taiwan University, related experience of implementing an institutional repository for Digital Archive Communities at the University. In this system the original rich metadata is used for display, and is mapped to simple Dublin Core for search purposes. Leif Andresen, Danish National Library Authority, gave an account of DC providing a common presentation for data from archives, libraries and museums. He outlined mappings from sector specific formats and the DC extensions required. Michael Toth, Michael Toth Associates, fascinated the audience with a description of the role of DC metadata within the Archimedes Palimpsest Manuscript Imaging project. Multispectral imaging has been used to identify layers of text in this thousand year-old manuscript, and the content of the resulting images described using DC, alongside richer metadata. For those who have been associated with the DCMI over the years it is a real thrill to see how DC is proving useful in providing access to such a significant cultural artefact [15].

Collection Description

Marty Kurth and Jim LeBlanc of Cornell University Library presented a paper on their use of the model developed by Michael Heaney in An Analytical Model of Collections and their Catalogues [16] and of the application profile being developed by the DCMI Collection Description Working Group [17] to support the description of operations on catalogues, i.e. on collections of metadata records. While the profile developed by the DCMI CD WG encompasses the concept of services related to collections, it concerns itself only with services which implement a generic retrieval operation, with ‘services which provide access to the items within collections’. Kurth and LeBlanc, on the other hand, extended their view to services performing a range of ‘maintenance’ functions on the catalogue (including accrual, deletion, modification, migration etc).

ePrints Application Profile

The ePrints Application Profile [18] was a new piece of work presented this year in the form of a special session. The profile was developed in the UK by Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation, and Julie Allinson, UKOLN, with funding from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee). This session in Mexico provided an opportunity to seek validation of the profile from the assembled expert community. Julie and Andy presented an introduction to and overview of the work and the different work elements. The requirements-gathering exercise that formed the initial part of this work demonstrated the need for a more complex application model than that provided by ‘Simple DC’. The ensuing model adopted the FRBR entities and was based on the DCMI Abstract Model notion of a ‘description set’ to capture descriptions about each of the main FRBR entities (works, expressions, manifestations and items). The resulting application profile provides a richer metadata set, in terms of both the properties captured about the eprint and also in the relationships expressed between entities. Reactions to this more complex approach were generally positive. There was some concern expressed about the retrospective editing for repositories and also some questions relating to the implementation by software developers. It was also accepted that there is still work to do, particularly in creating an XML schema. There were some useful suggestions - for example that we talk to citation services about the work; and that we look to extend the profile to model e-theses fully. The final question put to the group was whether they felt a DC taskforce for eprints would be useful at which there was universal agreement.

FRBR also featured in a presentation by another conference newcomer, Ayako Morozumi, University of Tsukuba, who outlined Japanese work to map Dublin Core, and other metadata models to FRBR, in order to assess the usefulness of this model for an inclusive information environment.

Communities, and the Rest

Such a varied programme with a wealth of parallel sessions presents a considerable challenge to capture in such a relatively short report. Other highlights of the conference included well-attended early morning tutorials on basic semantics (Marty Kurth, Cornell University Library), basic syntax (Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation), Vocabularies (Joe Tennis, University of British Columbia) and Application Profiles (Diane Hillman, Cornell University). In addition to those already mentioned, Working Group meetings were held for the Kernel, Date, Agents, Accessibility, Tools, Government and Localization and Internationalization groups [19], along with the Global Corporate Circle and special sessions for French Language Projects and Portuguese and Spanish Language Projects.

Paper sessions and topics ranged from the interoperability framework and application profile development, through SKOS, OWL and the LCSH, to DC implementations in imaging projects and cultural heritage preservation databases, metadata for French PhD theses, semantic mediacasting and digital signatures. For Education there was a Working Group meeting, reports from the field and a paper session on Metadata for Education featuring a presentation from CETIS colleagues on the JISC scoping study on vocabularies for describing pedagogical approaches in e-learning.

Finally, the special session on metadata and social tagging highlighted the importance of the more informal and community-oriented approaches to metadata creation that have emerged through social bookmarking and other ‘tagging’-based services, and suggested that this is an area that DCMI may wish to explore further in the future.

Conference Closing

On the final day, Mike Crandall continued the theme of DC-Education with his closing keynote presentation. Mike talked about the Product, the Process and the People involved in DCMI. By taking the products (the element set and abstract model), the processes of collaboration and community development and the enthusiasm of the people involved in DCMI, Mike outlined success stories already out there on the Web. For the future, he talked about taking forward the DCMI message to educate the wider metadata community, reiterating opening comments by Thomas Baker on the advantages offered by the metadata element set and the Abstract Model working together to create community-specific application profiles.

Reflections

Overall impressions of DC-2006 was that it was characterised not so much by any Big New Ideas which set people talking animatedly in the sessions and in the bars afterwards, but rather by a sense of consolidation. As Andy Powell [20] and Stu Weibel [21] note in their weblog posts, at DC-2006 there was a strong feeling that this was the year in which the DCMI Abstract Model became firmly ‘embedded’ in the activity of DCMI, of working groups and of DC implementers.

Whereas in 2004 and 2005, the feeling may have been one of people asking, ‘What is this thing?’ and ‘Do I really need this? Why should I bother?’, at DC 2006, in both the working group meetings and the research paper sessions, there was a clear sense that people were using the DCAM as their foundation, and indeed in some cases providing critical feedback on the DCAM itself. Of course, there is much work still to be done in this area, not least in the revisions to the model itself that are currently under discussion, and in the finalisation of the ‘encoding guidelines’ specifications which build directly on the DCAM to describe how to represent DC metadata description sets in concrete forms. But it seems the value of an abstract model in capturing a shared conception of ‘what DC metadata is’ has been accepted, and the use of that model is becoming well established amongst implementers.

As before, one of the most rewarding and interesting parts of the conference was to meet new people, particularly from the Latin American community. It is in meeting and conversing with those new to the DC conference that one learns what is of interest from the wider international perspective. Delegates left the Karmina Palace Hotel having enjoyed a stimulating conference, and having made many new friends and professional contacts. We hope the DCMI can build on the outcomes of this successful conference over the next year.

References