Announcements:

DCMI launches donations program

2012-10-08, DCMI has created a Donations Program to support specific DCMI activities. Descriptions of donation categories are available at http://dublincore.org/support/. In addition to donations targeting support for DCMI International Conference fellowships to defray travel and accommodations costs for select fellows, the Program includes support for current DCMI Work Themes: "Platform-independent Application Profiles", 'Mapping Diverse Vocabularies" and "Sustainable Vocabularies". Work theme donations will be used primarily to support stipends to community members who take on editorial responsibilities for specific work themes. In addition, work theme donations provide community members with the means to "vote" regarding which theme or themes are most important to them.

NISO/DCMI Webinar: Embedding Linked Data invisibly into Web pages: Strategies and workflows for publishing with RDFa

2012-09-17, A NISO/DCMI Webinar with Brian Sletten and Stéphane Corlosquet will be held online at 1:00PM Eastern Time (17:00 UTC) on 24 October 2012. Registration for this webinar closes 24 October 2012 at 12:00PM Eastern (16:00 UTC). This webinar will describe how RDFa and Drupal 7 can improve how organizations publish information and data on the Web for both internal and external consumption. It will discuss what is required to use these features and how they impact publication workflow. The talk will focus on high-level and accessible demonstrations of what is possible. Technical people should learn how to proceed while non-technical people will learn what is possible. A full description of the webinar can be found at http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/dcmi/publishing_with_RDFa/.

Planning begins for DC-2013 in Lisbon

2012-09-17, Planning for DC-2013 in Lisbon, Portugal on 2-6 September 2013 has started. The conference will be collocated with iPRES 2013 and will be hosted by IST - Instituto Superior Técnico (Engineering School of the Lisbon Technical University). Muriel Foulonneau (Henri Tudor Research Centre) and Kai Eckert (Mannheim University Library) have agreed to serve as Program Committee co-chairs.

Current DCMI Work Themes:

DCMI has a set of "work themes" that focus the Initiative as a whole and change as the metadata ecology evolves. The themes address broad issues in metadata that cut across the more siloed interests of domain-specific Communities and Task Groups within the Initiative. These DCMI-supported work themes receive targeted attention and commitment of resources from DCMI as an organization.

Platform-independent Application Profiles

The DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM), published as a DCMI Recommendation in 2007, provides an abstract syntax for packaging Semantic-Web-compatible data in validatable record formats. DCAM was designed to bridge the modern paradigm of the unbounded Linked Data graph and the more familiar paradigm of the validatable metadata record, locally managed and constrained using a myriad of software platforms and implementation technologies. For five years, DCAM has inspired a wide range of deployment experiences, and the core RDF standards themselves continue to be extended. The activity "platform-independent application profiles" is re-evaluating the need and requirements for a common language to express metadata design patterns, both as templates for Linked-Data-compatible data formats and as reference points for creating and consuming coherent metadata within communities of discourse and practice.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Platform-independent Application Profiles activity wiki

Discussion: Architecture Forum mailing list & list archive

Mapping Diverse Vocabularies

While DCMI Metadata Terms and other core vocabularies increase the coherence of metadata by providing shared reference points, the unavoidable proliferation of diverse but overlapping vocabularies threatens to create metadata silos. A key part of the solution is to create machine-readable mappings. The activity "mapping diverse vocabularies" aims at mapping DCMI metadata terms to related terms in other vocabularies. In the absence of well-established practices for publishing and maintaining such mappings, this activity aspires to establish a workflow and publication practices that can be adopted by other vocabulary maintainers. The starting point for this activity is a mapping to the terms defined by the Schema.org initiative.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Mapping Diverse Vocabularies activity wiki

Discussion: Architecture Forum mailing list & list archive

Sustainable Vocabularies

As a foundation for applications, the value of any given vocabulary depends on the perceived certainty that the vocabulary—both its machine-readable schemas and human-readable specification documents—will remain reliably accessible over time and that its URIs will not be sold, re-purposed, or simply forgotten. In order to raise awareness of this issue, DCMI has formulated an agreement with the FOAF Project, which is owned by individuals, with contingency plans for transferring maintenance control in the short or long term should exigent circumstances require. This activity examines the issues around vocabulary sustainability and governance with the goal of formulating best practices and, ultimately, of ensuring that our vocabularies will be preserved by society's long-term memory institutions.

Monitor & participate in this activity:

Meeting Minutes & Work Agenda: Vocabulary Management Community wiki

Discussion: Vocabulary Management Community mailing list & list archive

DCMI Terms Technical Update:

DCMI Metadata Terms published with RDFa markup

2012-06-14, A maintenance release of DCMI Metadata Terms, published today, now includes HTML markup describing all of its properties, classes, datatypes, and vocabulary encoding schemes in machine-readable RDF in accordance with the new W3C RDFa Lite 1.1 specification. RDFa Lite 1.1, published as a W3C Recommendation on 7 June 2012, is the simplest variant of RDFa, a syntax for embedding structured data in Web pages. A Web page with RDFa provides -- in the same source document -- both the human-readable text rendered on-screen by browsers and the detailed machine-readable representation needed by Semantic Web applications. The publication software used by DCMI for the past decade was modified and extended to support RDFa by Hugh Barnes, Gregg Kellogg, and Mitsuharu Nagamori with help from Manu Sporny, Tom Baker, Dan Brickley, and Jon Phipps. All of the software and data used to generate this documentation is available from an open-source repository on GitHub.

DCMI Metadata Terms available in multiple formats via content negotiation

2012-06-14, Following the W3C guidelines "Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies", documentation of DCMI's metadata terms may now be requested by Web browsers and software applications in several formats. For example, an RDF description of the DCMI property "Title" may be requested as a file in RDF/XML or Turtle syntax, via HTTP content negotiation, or as an HTML page with an RDF representation embedded in its markup using RDFa. Since March 2000, users navigating to the URI http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title in a Web browser have been shown a difficult-to-read RDF/XML schema. Browsers will now display a human-readable HTML document, and most browsers will take users to the spot in the page where the property "Title" is defined. DCMI's implementation of content negotiation was undertaken by Jon Phipps with assistance from Tom Baker and Jinho Park. Interested software implementers are invited to inspect, comment on, contribute to, or raise issues about the approach taken, which is fully documented in an open-source repository on GitHub.