Harald Krottmaier, currently participating in the DELOS researcher exchange programme at ETHZ, provides an overview of current activity in a subtask of the Information Access and Personalization workpackage concerning metadata.

Introduction

To reach the objectives of the DELOS WP2 cluster, several tasks and subtasks have already been defined. We at the IICM (Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media) are working on one of these tasks. This short report will outline the study on metadata models currently being undertaken. The study will promote the knowledge of available technologies in the context of metadata and digital libraries.

Metadata is...

Within our community the short-hand expression is generally well known: that metadata is data about data. You may find this statement several thousand times on the Web as a definition of metadata. There are however many different models available, and depending on the application, slightly different implementations exist.

MARC, Dublin Core, MPEG-7, RDF etc. are just some of the currently available models used in the field of digital libraries. One goal of the study is to list the standards and link to the responsible institutions. It should also give a comprehensive overview of these models and point to existing applications using the models. Since this is 'old hat' in the field of digital libraries, we do not intend to replicate existing material, but instead point to definitions available, for example, at UKOLN (e.g. Metadata, BIBLINK), W3C and other research bodies.

Metadata in the field of services offered by digital libraries is, on the other hand, relatively new. It is necessary to describe services and put these descriptions into repositories. A short exploration of currently available services will be provided as an impetus to increase interest in this subject. To furnish one instance: we are going to examine in detail OSIRIS (http://www.osiris.ethz.ch/), an Open Services Infrastructure for Reliable and Integrated process Support.

The technologies used in OSIRIS and other systems will be explored and described. WSDL (Web Service Description Language), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language), are just a few of the items to be covered in the study. Historically important developments, such as RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) will also be listed. Additionally, initiatives have been established to promote sharing and reuse of metadata. A short overview in this respect those will also be provided.

Questions and current answers regarding service registries will complete the study.

Implementation

To make it possible for all members of DELOS to participate in the creation of the study and to make it possible to reuse this content in lectures and other dissemination events, we are going to use a WIKI-system.

Currently we are exploring several implementations of WIKI-systems (JSPWiki, MediaWiki to mention just two). If such a system is deployed, we will distribute the URL and invite you to participate actively and contribute to the survey.

Author Details

Harald Krottmaier
Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM)
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Technology
Graz
Austria

url: http://www.informatik.tugraz.at/
E-mail:
Telephone: +43-316-873-5631

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Publication date: October 2004
File last modified: Monday, 22-May-2006

The Delos Newsletter is published by the Delos Network of Excellence
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