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Theme

Internet

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Theme

Internet

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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.
At the time of writing, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) has clarified its commitment to the simple approach. The qualification principles announced in early 2000 support the use of DC elements as the basis for simple statements about resources, rather than as the foundation for more descriptive clauses. This paper takes a critical look at some of the issues that led up to this renewed commitment to simplicity. We argue that: * There remains a compelling need for simple, "pidgin" metadata. From a technical and economic perspective, document-centric metadata, where simple string values are associated with a finite set of properties, is most appropriate for generic, cross-domain discovery queries in the Internet Commons. Such metadata is not necessarily fixed in physical records, but may be projected algorithmically from more complex metadata or from content itself. * The Dublin Core, while far from perfect from an engineering perspective, is an acceptable standard for such simple metadata. Agreements in the global information space are as much social as technical, and the process by which the Dublin Core has been developed, involving a broad cross-section of international participants, is a model for such "socially developed" standards. * Efforts to introduce complexity into Dublin Core are misguided. Complex descriptions may be necessary for some Web resources and for some purposes, such as administration, preservation, and reference linking. However, complex descriptions require more expressive data models that differentiate between agents, documents, contexts, events, and the like. An attempt to intermix simplicity and complexity, and the data models most appropriate for them, defeats the equally noble goals of cross-domain description and extensive resource description. * The principle of modularity suggests that metadata formats tailored for simplicity be used alongside others tailored for complexity.