Lagoze, C.: Keeping Dublin Core simple : Cross-domain discovery or resource description? (2001)
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- Abstract
- Reality is messy. Individuals perceive or define objects differently. Objects may change over time, morphing into new versions of their former selves or into things altogether different. A book can give rise to a translation, derivation, or edition, and these resulting objects are related in complex ways to each other and to the people and contexts in which they were created or transformed. Providing a normalized view of such a messy reality is a precondition for managing information. From the first library catalogs, through Melvil Dewey's Decimal Classification system in the nineteenth century, to today's MARC encoding of AACR2 cataloging rules, libraries have epitomized the process of what David Levy calls "order making", whereby catalogers impose a veneer of regularity on the natural disorder of the artifacts they encounter. The pre-digital library within which the Catalog and its standards evolved was relatively self-contained and controlled. Creating and maintaining catalog records was, and still is, the task of professionals. Today's Web, in contrast, has brought together a diversity of information management communities, with a variety of order-making standards, into what Stuart Weibel has called the Internet Commons. The sheer scale of this context has motivated a search for new ways to describe and index information. Second-generation search engines such as Google can yield astonishingly good search results, while tools such as ResearchIndex for automatic citation indexing and techniques for inferring "Web communities" from constellations of hyperlinks promise even better methods for focusing queries on information from authoritative sources. Such "automated digital libraries," according to Bill Arms, promise to radically reduce the cost of managing information. Alongside the development of such automated methods, there is increasing interest in metadata as a means of imposing pre-defined order on Web content. While the size and changeability of the Web makes professional cataloging impractical, a minimal amount of information ordering, such as that represented by the Dublin Core (DC), may vastly improve the quality of an automatic index at low cost; indeed, recent work suggests that some types of simple description may be generated with little or no human intervention.
Metadata is not monolithic. Instead, it is helpful to think of metadata as multiple views that can be projected from a single information object. Such views can form the basis of customized information services, such as search engines. Multiple views -- different types of metadata associated with a Web resource -- can facilitate a "drill-down" search paradigm, whereby people start their searches at a high level and later narrow their focus using domain-specific search categories. In Figure 1, for example, Mona Lisa may be viewed from the perspective of non-specialized searchers, with categories that are valid across domains (who painted it and when?); in the context of a museum (when and how was it acquired?); in the geo-spatial context of a walking tour using mobile devices (where is it in the gallery?); and in a legal framework (who owns the rights to its reproduction?). Multiple descriptive views imply a modular approach to metadata. Modularity is the basis of metadata architectures such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which permit different communities of expertise to associate and maintain multiple metadata packages for Web resources. As noted elsewhere, static association of multiple metadata packages with resources is but one way of achieving modularity. Another method is to computationally derive order-making views customized to the current needs of a client. This paper examines the evolution and scope of the Dublin Core from this perspective of metadata modularization. Dublin Core began in 1995 with a specific goal and scope -- as an easy-to-create and maintain descriptive format to facilitate cross-domain resource discovery on the Web. Over the years, this goal of "simple metadata for coarse-granularity discovery" came to mix with another goal -- that of community and domain-specific resource description and its attendant complexity. A notion of "qualified Dublin Core" evolved whereby the model for simple resource discovery -- a set of simple metadata elements in a flat, document-centric model -- would form the basis of more complex descriptions by treating the values of its elements as entities with properties ("component elements") in their own right.
