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From NLA's invitation:
"Following on from the 4th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop in Canberra on 3 - 5 March, the
National Library of Australia is organising a Seminar on International Metadata Developments
on the 6 March.
The Seminar will draw on the wide range of international speakers attending the 4th Dublin Core
Workshop and aims to provide a first hand opportunity to understand the wide range of
international developments in metadata standards and to discuss possible ways of implementing
standard metadata elements by Australian creators of electronic publications.
Metadata provides a consistent way of describing Internet information which improves the
reliability and efficiency of searching. This Seminar aims to provide a good overview of the latest
developments and standards that are being designed to improve the accessibility to electronic
information.
Anyone who is a creator of information resources on the Internet is encouraged to attend this
important seminar. Representatives from libraries, museums, archives and government agencies
and other electronic publishers are particularly welcome."
Some notes on the presentation:
The origins and objectives of the Dublin Core, Stuart Weibel
- Dublin Core good enough for images as well as "documents".
- Recommended:
Results of "Canberra Core" meeting:
- Tension between simplicity and flexibility. Want "semantic interpretability".
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- "Canberra Qualifiers":
- Scheme: formal data content standard
- Language: Natural language the element content is expressed in
- Type: such as "Date"
- Statement on HTML encoding for meta-data: (two approaches).
- RFC for encoding
- More work on multi-languages
- Challenge for librarians to create good meta-data
The Warwick Framework, Carl Lagoze
- Avoid "hemisphereism" (spring is a different time in Australia). :-)
- How do you put meta-data in the web?
- Traditional meta-data distinction: "content" is a first class object. "metadata is "second class".
- Distinction between metadata and data removed from the architecture
- http://www.ncstrl.org/Dienst/Repository/2.0/Body/ncstrl.cornell/TR96-1593/html
- Warwick framework: containers for aggregating, with nesting.
Metadata projects in Australia (Renato Iannella, Senior Research
Scientist, DSTC, Brisbane)
- Benefits of meta-data
- Producer provides relevant information
- no need to guess content
- less Internet traffic from web crawlers
- In Australia
- Support for Dublin Core
- ERIN
- EDNA
- ANZLIC
- Research at DSTC
- Persistent names, URNs and PERLs
- Metasearchers
- GILS
- Modified version of Harvest for searching META tags (to be released next week). Will then compare with full text searchers.
- PICS as a meta-data service
Break
Unfortunately at this point I had to miss a bit of the seminar to issue an
on-line Ministerial Statement
for the Minister for Defence. But you will note that the document includes Dublin Core Meta-data tags. :-)
Discussion of the continuing process for metadata implementation in Australia
- How do companies get involved? Eric Wainwright suggested the Government could look at more flexible partnering arrangements with industry. I mentioned the IT R&D enquiry.
- Discussion of collaboration on cultural meta-data.
- NLA volunteered to host list server and web pages on meta-data.
Some Comments
The meta-data discussion during the first half of the seminar at times reached a level of abstraction which
reminds me of the ISO IRDS work. At this point only a few experts understand what its about and there is a
danger that design will outstrip trial. An analogy was used during the seminar of an architect designing
the approach on a bridge, as an example of the need for long term planning. The analogy is
flawed, as architects don't design bridges, engineers do. Where engineers are unsure over a new design
they test it on a model. In the same way we need to be cautious about building elaborate meta-data
structures until they are tested on a small scale.
Use of PICS for meta-data is technically clever (I suggested it in the IMSC-TG report). However, may
carry too much political baggage, due to PICS being associated with censorship, to be usable in practice.
An issue which came up this week in the meeting of the Steering Committee of the
IT R&D project is that Australia is paying for
research in this field, so how can we ensure that Australia receives a benefit from products and services,
based on this work. Renato Iannella, mentioned the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC)
in Brisbane is releasing a meta-data search facility on the net next week. This could be a hit product.
I hope that DSTC have obtained a trademark for the facility and protected the intellectual property involved (partly funded by
the Australia community) so Australia can retain any commercial benefit from this.
See also:
![[ACS LOGO]](http://www.acs.org.au/images/logos/acs.gif)
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