[LINK] RFI: Dublin Core 10 Years On

Tom Worthington Tom.Worthington at tomw.net.au
Thu Jan 18 08:52:12 AEDT 2007


At 01:10 PM 1/17/2007, Roger Clarke wrote:
>... My impression is that a lot of developments have occurred 
>alongside rather than as part of the Dublin Code movement, e.g. DOI, DRM. ...

Dublin Core is widely used and I think it is a success as a standard.

Perhaps the most widespread use of Dublin Core is in the Creative 
Commons Licence <http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/implement>.

When you select a CC licence <http://creativecommons.org/license/> 
and describe your content, the Dublin Core metadata is encoded in RDF 
format. Most people using CC will not know what all the squiggly 
stuff is and just copy it into their web page as instructed, so they 
never see any mention of Dublin Core.

Dublin Core is also used in the:

* Australian Digital Theses Program 
http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/ecommerce/metadata.shtml#adt>,
* Australian Government Locator Service (AGLS) 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/ecommerce/metadata.shtml#agls> and the
* Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies (RKMS) 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/ecommerce/document_management.shtml#rmsca>.

How much these are actually uses would be an interesting area for 
research. The problem with metadata stadards is they look trivially 
simple, until you try to actually use them.

I have had three ANU students look at metadata for online museums. In 
the last project they used data from real Australian museum 
collections, including the museum with the photos which inspired the 
movie Ten Canoes 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2006/12/ten-canoes-from-samoa-to-arafura-swamp.html>. 
The metadata looks simple, until you try to fit the real world data into it.

A new student signed up yesterday and this time they will try to 
combine what is in the metadata fields predefined by museum experts 
with what is in the real world (at least the real world of the web). 
The idea is to cross reference the expert taxonomy with the 
folksonomy and represent it using the semantic web. The payoff will 
be if this can be linked to commercial services such as Amazon and 
eBay. A museum could then use this to sell products related to their 
collection, or to check to see if stolen artifacts are being sold on eBay.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml  




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