Building Bridges: steps towards a seamless information environment

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Building Bridgessteps towards a seamless
information environment

• Paul Miller
• Interoperability Focus
• UK Office for Library Information Networking
  (UKOLN)
• P.Miller_at_ukoln.ac.uk http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/

UKOLN is funded by the Library and Information
Commission, the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding
Councils, as well as by project funding from the
JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also
receives support from the Universities of Bath
and Hull where staff are based.
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Standard solutions
The nice thing about standards is that
there are so many to choose from!
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Standard solutions
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So why use standards?

• Benefit from the expertise of others
• Standards are (often!) compiled by groups of very
  knowledgeable people and you cant afford to
  employ them all yourself
• Enforce rigour in internal practices
• Standards are means of asserting control over the
  resource, allowing you to manage it more
  effectively
• Facilitate interoperability (and access)
• Museums hold their resources in trust
• Considered deployment of standard solutions makes
  access to those resources feasible for many
• A virtual museum for the works of Da Vinci?.

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What do standards do?

• Help identify whats important
• CIMIs Access Points
• Mandatory fields
• Allow for consistent use of terminology
• Name Authority Files
• Thesauri
• Lookup tables
• Enable internal and external data exchange
• Reduce duplication of effort
• Minimise (hopefully!) wasted effort
• Reflect consensus.

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What types of standard are there?

• Terminology
• Roma, not Rome
• Roma is preferred to Rome
• Format
• Miller, A.P. 1971, not Paul Miller
• Discovery/ Semantics/ DBMS
• A gross simplification, and a very big bucket
• Creator, Subject, Title, Description
• Syntax
• ltRDF xmlns http//www.w3.org/TR/WD-rdf-syntax
  gt
• Transfer
• ftp//ftp.niso.org/ .

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What is Metadata?

• meaningless jargon
• ora fashionable, and terribly misused, term for
  what weve always done
• ora means of turning data into information
• anddata about data
• andthe name of an author (William Golding)
• andthe title of a book (the Smithsonian).

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Introducing the Dublin Core

• An attempt to improve resource discovery on the
  Web
• now adopted more broadly
• Building an interdisciplinary consensus about a
  core element set for resource discovery
• simple and intuitive
• crossdisciplinary not just libraries!!
• international
• open and consensual
• flexible.

See http//purl.org/dc/
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Introducing the Dublin Core

• 15 elements of descriptive metadata
• All elements optional
• All elements repeatable
• The whole is extensible
• offers a starting point for semantically richer
  descriptions
• Interdisciplinary
• libraries, government, museums, archives
• International
• available in more than 20 languages, with more on
  the way...

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Introducing the Dublin Core

• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Description
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Date
• Type

• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

http//purl.org/dc/
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Introducing XML

• eXtensible Markup Language
• World Wide Web Consortium recommendation
• Simplified subset of SGML for use on Web
• Addresses HTMLs lack of evolvability
• Easily extended
• Supported by major vendors
• Increasingly used as a transfer syntax, but
  capable of far more.

See http//www.w3.org/XML/
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Introducing RDF

• Resource Description Framework
• W3C Recommendation
• Fully compliant application of XML
• Improves upon XML, HTML, PICS
• Machine understandable metadata!
• Supports structure
• Increasing interest

See http//www.w3.org/RDF/
See http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/ dc/
datamodel/WDdcrdf/
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Introducing Z39.50

• North American Standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.501995
  version 3)
• International Standard (ISO 23950)
• Originally librarycentric
• Permits remote searching of databases
• Access via Z client or over web
• Relies upon Profiles
• CIMI profile for cultural heritage
• GEO profile for Geospatial data.

See http//www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue21/
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Z39.50 Challenges

• Profiles for each discipline
• Defeats interoperability?
• Vendor interpretation of the standard
• Bib1 bloat
• Largely invisible to the user
• Seen as complicated
• Seen as expensive
• Seen as oldfashioned
• Surely no match for XML/RDF/ whatever.

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Getting involved

• Cultural Heritage bodies
• Already produce excellent standards within the
  community (SPECTRUM, CIDOC reference model)
• Collaborate with broader initiatives
• CIMI produced a standard for Cultural Heritage
  information and Z39.50 (the CIMI Profile), now
  before ISO
• Dublin Core used by CIMI, AMOL, AHDS, AMICO, and
  others
• Good cultural heritage representation on
  committees
• Rights Management issues from the music/film/book
  publishing sphere very relevant to museums
• Have a great deal in common with libraries,
  archives and others.

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Some pointers

• Interoperability Focus
• http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/interopfocus/
• Interoperability Mailing List
• http//www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/interoperability/
• Dublin Core
• http//purl.org/dc/
• W3C
• http//www.w3.org/
• Z39.50
• http//www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/