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Summary of 2003 Activities Over the final six months of the project, CORES partners have continued to focus on the two main themes of the project:
During 2003 the project has encouraged the signatories of the CORES resolution to progress assignment of unique identifiers to their metadata elements. The CORES resolution was agreed at a meeting of the Standards Interoperability Forum in Brussels, November 2002, which brought together representatives of several metadata standards activities. Both the project and the signatories have promoted the resolution as a means to agree common naming conventions that will support the emerging Semantic Web. Development work on the CORES Registry and Schema Creation Tool was completed early in 2003. After a period of testing, the two tools were made available, linked from the CORES Web site. The CORES Registry Workshop was held in Budapest, March 2003, to introduce participants to the tools and to elicit feedback. A detailed evaluation report outlines reaction to the tools from workshop attendees, as well as various issues raised by partners themselves. Various opportunities for dissemination were undertaken this year. Highlights include:
Work areas CORES resolution Follow-up contact has been made with signatories of the CORES resolution both to encourage implementation and to monitor progress. Signatories have indicated plans for implementing the resolution, and support for the CORES resolution was mentioned in a press release from EDItEUR and the International DOI Foundation . As part of their work towards metadata harmonisation, these two bodies are creating a common data dictionary for ONIX and DOI data elements, and all dictionary terms will have unique identifiers (URIs) associated with them.
Those standards activities that were unable to send representatives to the Brussels Standards Interoperability Forum (for example MPEG, FGDC and OASIS) have been informed of the meeting outcomes and were invited to become signatories to the resolution. A review of progress towards implementation of the Resolution has been published in the July 2003 issue of D-Lib magazine. CORES Registry and Schema Creation Tool CORES has been working to produce a Schema Creation and Registration Tool, and a complementary schema Registry. The CORES Registry has now been established on the SZTAKI Web site, and is accessible for searching and browsing. The Schema Creation and Registration tool is also available, and can be downloaded from the Registry home page. Initially the Registry was 'seeded' with the Dublin Core terms in readiness for use at the CORES workshop. The workshop, held at SZTAKI in March 2003, provided an opportunity for the creators and implementers of metadata schemas to explore the usefulness of the CORES Registry software by creating and registering schemas for vocabularies with which they were familiar. The workshop was attended by a number of individuals with expertise in related metadata registry developments. This enabled the project to obtain evaluation of the tools from a variety of perspectives. Other attendees had detailed knowledge of application profiles under development, and were able to offer detailed feedback on the effectiveness of the CORES data model for representing their schema, and the useability of the CORES tools. The workshop also provided an opportunity for participants to gain a working understanding of RDF and its application to the description of metadata vocabularies. This was very much a 'hands on' workshop, and the limited number of attendees allowed for project partners to pursue one-to-one discussion and to provide technical support when required. A detailed evaluation report has been drawn up and is available from the CORES Web site. In general the tools were found to be useful but a number of aspects were considered to require further refinements such as
Workshop attendees have been encouraged to follow up their introduction to the CORES tools by completing registration of their element sets and application profiles in the Registry. In order to facilitate this, whilst allowing for experimentation amongst new users, a 'sandbox registry' has been created alongside the CORES Registry. This will allow potential users to experiment with use of the tool whilst not committing to complete registration. In order to provide re-assurance to those with a commitment to creating an accurate and complete record of their schema, the project has issued a Persistence Policy. Persistence policy There was some reluctance amongst workshop participants to spend effort registering their schema when the persistence of the registry depends on short term project funding. If people are to spend significant effort registering schemas then the future availability of the CORES tools needs to be assured. In response to this requirement a persistence policy has been formulated. This policy commits UKOLN and SZTAKI to maintain the registry server and its Web Interface online at the address http://cores.dsd.sztaki.hu/ for at least one year. The policy also urges agencies creating and submitting those schemas to make their completed schemas available on a Web server and report their URLs to cores-registry@jiscmail.ac.uk. Through to June 2004, UKOLN and SZTAKI will maintain (and if necessary update) a list of pointers to all such source schemas at http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/schema/. This means that by consulting this list, any implementer could re-index the source schemas using the CORES Registry Software and thereby reconstitute a functional equivalent of the CORES Registry. The list of schema locations will be maintained only for data submitted to the primary registry only. Related activity CORES partners have collaborated with a number of related activities and intend to continue this involvement in the future.
Initial links have also been made with the eScience community, where there is a growing interest in managing metadata schemas and ontologies. Connections between the communities were explored at a joint UKOLN and National e-Science Centre workshop in Edinburgh, May 2003, Schemas and ontologies: building a semantic infrastructure for GRIDs and digital libraries, where the CORES project was presented within a review of registry activity. Maintained and hosted by: UKOLN |
