On 18 November 2002, several Standards-Developing Organizations (SDOs) regarded as maintenance authorities for metadata elements were represented at a meeting convened by the CORES Project. CORES is a fifteen-month Accompanying Measure under the European Commission's IST Programme in the area of metadata interoperability (http://www.cores-eu.net/).
The meeting achieved consensus on a resolution to assign unique identifiers to metadata elements as a useful first step towards the development of mapping infrastructures and interoperability services. The participants agreed to promote the implementation of this consensus in their standards communities and beyond.
Whereas:
our metadata standards have "elements" -- units of meaning comparable and mappable to elements of other standards,
We agree:
to assign Uniform Resource Identifiers to our elements;
to articulate and publish specific policies regarding the stability, persistence, and maintenance of the URIs assigned to the elements.
This resolution promotes the use of URIs for identifying metadata elements. However, there is no expectation that these URIs will be used to represent those elements within particular application environments -- e.g., to include them in instance metadata records or use them in SQL queries. Rather, the intent is to offer a common citation mechanism usable, when needed, for purposes of interoperability across standards.
While the resolution focuses on the identification of individual metadata elements, URIs should also be used to identify other relevant entities at various levels of granularity, such as sets of elements (schemas) and the terms and sets of controlled vocabularies of metadata values. Deciding which of its own entities are important or salient enough to be assigned URIs is the prerogative of a particular Standards-Developing Organization.
This resolution specifies the use of URIs as identifiers with no requirement or expectation that those URIs will reference anything on the World Wide Web, such as documentation pages or machine-understandable representations of metadata elements.
Eliot Christian, USGS, for GILS
Brian Green, EDItEUR, for ONIX
Rebecca Guenther, Library of Congress, for MARC21
Keith Jeffery, EuroCRIS, for CERIF
Norman Paskin, International DOI Foundation, for the Digital Object Identifier
Robby Robson, IEEE LTSC, for IEEE/LOM
Stuart Weibel, DCMI, for the Dublin Core
