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Abstract

Over the past three years, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has achieved a broad international consensus on the semantics of a simple element set for describing electronic resources. Since the first workshop in March 1995, which was reported in the very first issue of D-Lib Magazine, Dublin Core has been the topic of perhaps a dozen articles here. Originally intended to be simple and intuitive enough for authors to tag Web pages without special training, Dublin Core is being adapted now for more specialized uses, from government information and legal deposit to museum informatics and electronic commerce. To meet such specialized requirements, Dublin Core can be customized with additional elements or qualifiers. However, these refinements can compromise interoperability across applications. There are tradeoffs between using specific terms that precisely meet local needs versus general terms that are understood more widely. We can better understand this inevitable tension between simplicity and complexity if we recognize that metadata is a form of human language. With Dublin Core, as with a natural language, people are inclined to stretch definitions, make general terms more specific, specific terms more general, misunderstand intended meanings, and coin new terms. One goal of this paper, therefore, will be to examine the experience of some related ways to seek semantic interoperability through simplicity: planned languages, interlingua constructs, and pidgins. The problem of semantic interoperability is compounded when we consider Dublin Core in translation. All of the workshops, documents, mailing lists, user guides, and working group outputs of the Dublin Core Initiative have been in English. But in many countries and for many applications, people need a metadata standard in their own language. In principle, the broad elements of Dublin Core can be defined equally well in Bulgarian or Hindi. Since Dublin Core is a controlled standard, however, any parallel definitions need to be kept in sync as the standard evolves. Another goal of the paper, then, will be to define the conceptual and organizational problem of maintaining a metadata standard in multiple languages. In addition to a name and definition, which are meant for human consumption, each Dublin Core element has a label, or indexing token, meant for harvesting by search engines. For practical reasons, these machine-readable tokens are English-looking strings such as Creator and Subject (just as HTML tags are called HEAD, BODY, or TITLE). These tokens, which are shared by Dublin Cores in every language, ensure that metadata fields created in any particular language are indexed together across repositories. As symbols of underlying universal semantics, these tokens form the basis of semantic interoperability among the multiple Dublin Cores. As long as we limit ourselves to sharing these indexing tokens among exact translations of a simple set of fifteen broad elements, the definitions of which fit easily onto two pages, the problem of Dublin Core in multiple languages is straightforward. But nothing having to do with human language is ever so simple. Just as speakers of various languages must learn the language of Dublin Core in their own tongues, we must find the right words to talk about a metadata language that is expressable in many discipline-specific jargons and natural languages and that inevitably will evolve and change over time.

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Abstract

This article describes an approach for linking geographically distributed collections of metadata so that they are searchable as a single collection. We describe the infrastructure, which uses standard Internet protocols such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP), to distribute queries, return results, and exchange index information. We discuss the advantages of using linked collections of authoritative metadata as an alternative to using a keyword indexing search-engine for resource discovery. We examine other architectures that use metadata for resource discovery, such as Dienst/NCSTRL, the AHDS HTTP/Z39.50 Gateway, and the ROADS initiative. Finally, we discuss research issues and future directions of the project. The Internet Scout Project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and is located in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is charged with assisting the higher education community in resource discovery on the Internet. To that end, the Scout Report and subsequent subject-specific Scout Reports were developed to guide the U.S. higher education community to research-quality resources. The Scout Report Signpost utilizes the content from the Scout Reports as the basis of a metadata collection. Signpost consists of more than 2000 cataloged Internet sites using established standards such as Library of Congress subject headings and abbreviated call letters, and emerging standards such as the Dublin Core (DC). This searchable and browseable collection is free and freely accessible, as are all of the Internet Scout Project's services.
As well developed as both the Scout Reports and Signpost are, they cannot capture the wealth of high-quality content that is available on the Internet. An obvious next step toward increasing the usefulness of our own collection and its value to our customer base is to partner with other high-quality content providers who have developed similar collections and to develop a single, virtual collection. Project Isaac (working title) is the Internet Scout Project's latest resource discovery effort. Project Isaac involves the development of a research testbed that allows experimentation with protocols and algorithms for creating, maintaining, indexing and searching distributed collections of metadata. Project Isaac's infrastructure uses standard Internet protocols, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) to distribute queries, return results, and exchange index or centroid information. The overall goal is to support a single-search interface to geographically distributed and independently maintained metadata collections.