References List
Organizing and Providing Access to Information -- LIS 391D.2 -- Spring 1998
Miller,
P. (1996, September). Metadata for the masses. Ariadne(5), [On-line]. Available:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue5/metadata-masses/#intro.
This overview article attributes to Jack Myers the coining of the term "metadata"
in the 1960s to describe datasets. We define the term as data about data which
provides general information such as the author of a work, date of creation, and
links to related works. In the Web environment, similar conventions are not yet
available and that is why, in part, a search yields references that are not relevant
to the search. The article discusses a number of evolving standards that will
be convenient for search engines and human beings to use, simple to create so
that any web author can easily describe the contents of their page, and more facile
at making information accessible. Miller gives a brief description of the approach
taken by some search engines such as Alta Vista -- the use of the HTML <META>
tag, including qualifiers to the tag such as DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS, in web
documents, and discusses the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and its ease of
use and suitability for insertion in a variety of file types such as HTML, PostScript
files, and image formats. Other existing standards described include MARC, Directory
Interchange Format (DIF), and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format.
Moen, W. E. & McClure,
C. R. (1997). An evaluation of the Federal government’s implementation
of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS): Final report. General
Services Administration, Office of Information Technology Integration, Washington,
DC. [On-line]. Available: http://www.unt.edu/slis/research/gilseval/toc.htm.
This report evaluates the status of the implementation of GILS with an emphasis
on how well GILS is meeting user information needs. The report examines multiple
areas: how GILS is progressing as a locator service, how GILS serves various user
groups, how GILS improves public access to government information, and how GILS
works as a tool for information resources management. The report concludes that
the vision and basic architecture for GILS are still appropriate, but that the
vision of a government-wide information locator service has not yet been achieved,
particularly from the user viewpoint. The investigators recommend that GILS refocus
to gain clarity of purpose and launch a public awareness campaign after clarity
is achieved. They recommend that GILS be continually evaluated against emerging
technologies and standards, and that GILS be uncoupled from Records Management.
This is a very complete report with specific findings linked to a lengthy list
of recommendations for GILS Phase II.
U. S. Federal GILS Home Page. [On-line].
Available: http://www.usgs.gov/gils/index.html.
Provides links to Frequently Asked Questions, law and policy, technology for implementing
GILS, and other standards and technologies.
Dublin Core Home Page (1997).
Dublin core metadata. [On-line]. Available: http://purl.org/metadata/dublin_core.
This is a good starting point for anyone investigating metadata issues. It includes
links to Dublin Core relevant publications, 1995-1998, and the evolution of the
Warwick Framework concept.
Weibel, S. & Hakala, J. (1998, February).
DC-5: The Helsinki metadata workshop. D-Lib Magazine. [On-line]. Available:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february98/02weibel.html.
DC-5 refers to the 5th Dublin Core Workshop held in Helsinki, Finland, in October
of 1997. This article describes the progress underway toward standardization of
the unqualified Dublin Core model and the syntactic foundation for Web-based metadata
that the Resource Description Framework (RDF) now being developed under the auspices
of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) will provide. The Dublin Core community
is working closely with the RDF community to develop a common architecture to
support generalized metadata. Links to public working papers are provided. The
move toward standardization is well positioned and the syntactic questions are
now in the hands of the Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to discuss. The W3C has
a broad membership in the research and vendor community.
Weibel, S., Iannella,
R., & Cathro, W. (1997, June). The 4th Dublin core metadata workshop report,
DC-4, March 3-5, 1997, National Library of Australia, Canberra. D-Lib Magazine,
[On-line]. Available: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june97/metadata/06weibel.html.
This report summarizes the 4th conference in the evolution of the Dublin Core
element set and provides capsule summaries of each of the previous workshops in
the series. Especially helpful is the description of the tension between the minimalist
and structuralist positions described as a spectrum of resource description richness
ranging from full-text indexing to richly structured surrogates using fully developed
structured data. The report also references the evolution of Web metadata architectures
such as Cougar (the World Wide Web Consortium code word for the next version of
HTML), eXtensible Markup Language (XML), Platform for Internet Content Selection
(PICS), and Web Distributed Authoring and Version Control (WebDAV); issues such
as coverage elements multilinguality, and Metadata Registries; and the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments documents that are under development.
Links are provided to examples of projects using the Dublin Core metadata.
Heery, R. (1998, March). What is...RDF? Ariadne.
(14) [On-line]. Available: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue14/what-is/.
RDF is about metadata for Web resources. The proposed working model syntax addresses
digital signatures, intellectual property rights, content ratings, and resource
discovery. RDF is also a framework to realize the potential of XML and a significant
move toward syntactical interoperability. Very little concrete information about
this work is available, but the time line for development extends to December
1999 and more articles and briefs are expected between now and then. In this short
piece, Heery predicts that the Resource Description Framework (RDF) will be significant
and that work will progress rapidly on its development.
Lagoze, C., Lynch,
C. A., & Daniel, R. Jr. (1996). The Warwick framework: A container architecture
for aggregating sets of metadata. [On-line]. Available: http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu/Dienst/Repository/2.0/Body/ncstrl.cornell%2fTR96-1593/html.
This article provides a detailed description of the container architecture known
as the Warwick Framework. The framework is defined as a mechanism for aggregating
logically, and perhaps concretely, distinct packages of metadata. It will allow
designers of metadata sets to focus on their specific requirements, allow syntax
of metadata sets to vary, distribute the management of metadata sets, promote
interoperability and extensibility by allowing tools and agents to selectively
access and manipulate individual packages and ignore others, and permit access
to different metadata sets by not requiring changes to existing sets of metadata.
Two actual implementation scenarios are given and references are linked to other
work in progress to create new classes of information infrastructures different
from what exists today. In this paper, the authors predict that the Web will evolve
and transform into quite a different information infrastructure than we know today.
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