OAI, Dublin Core, Metadata and Image Collections

14 January 2003

A collection of links that may be useful in thinking about the issues of metadata for image collections

Making a Digital Library compliant to the Open Archives Initiative Metadata harvesting Protocol

Metadata standards, crosswalks, and standard organizations summary guide from Memorial University

Virginia Tech ImageBase

Colorado Digitization Program Metadata pages

Metadata Interchange Standards

NISO Releases Draft Standard for Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images

Welcome to the Resource for those creating, managing, distributing and using digital images

Final report of a planning process for the Academic Image Exchange (now the Academic Image Cooperative) Prototype. A digital image resource for students, teachers, and scholars of The History of Art and related disciplines (document submitted to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on 20 August 2000 on behalf of the project Executive Committee)

Virginia Dons FEDORA A Prototype for a Digital Object Repository (D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2000)

16 January
MIT's DSpace and their metadata page

...a qualified version of the Dublin Core schema based on the Dublin Core Libraries Working Group Application Profile (LAP)
See also a D-Lib Magazine summary article on DSpace (Jan 2003)

Standards and Metadata from University of Minnesota Digital Collections Unit, with core set of data elements

Creating and Distributing High Resolution Cartographic Images (David Yehling Allen) RLG DigiNews August 15 1998

The question I wish I had a clear understanding of the answer to: what's the crosswalk that translates an owner-made Dublin Core-ish record into MARC? See Dublin Core/MARC/GILS Crosswalk from Library of Congress, main Dublin Core Metadata Initiative page and Using Dublin Core and Current Elements and Usage Guide

CONNEXION, NETLIBRARY, AND CATALOGING INTERNET RESOURCES from UMass Amherst Library

Dublin Core metadata editor for Web pages (try it... viz: type in www.invasive.org and see what's returned)

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) from LoC

21 January
OAICat

The OAICat Open Source project is a Java Servlet web application providing an OAI-PMH v2.0 repository framework. This framework can be customized to work with arbitrary data repositories by implementing some Java interfaces.

24 February
Some materials on RDF and on Semantic Web (a good deal of overlap here) --also Dublin Core

Crosswalk list from MIT Metadata Advisory Group

Dublin Core and the Cataloging Rules from Penn State

Dublin Core/MARC/GILS Crosswalk (LoC, 2001-03-12)

5 March
Some other links found lately:

Title: Using a Web OPAC to deliver digital collections Author(s): Eileen C Mathias Journal: Online Information Review Year: 2003 Volume: 27 Number: 1 Page: 28 -- p36
'elephant' search in Digital Collections

Turnkey systems: EmbARK, Cumulus/Canto, Luna Insight

A page really worth your time and energies as a summary of a lot of metadata issues and practicalities: http://metamanagement.comm.nsdlib.org/IntroPage.html The A-Z of Thesauri may be useful in thinking about the issues of controlled vocabularies for various specialties, mentioned at the last meeting. The Crosswalks intro article at http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/intrometadata/2_articles/woodley/index.html is another efficient springboard, and the Library of Congress "Core Metadata Elements" seems like it addresses a lot of the questions some have about how to handle non-book materials, especially in the section on metadata levels.

A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections

7 March
Controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems available in the WWW. DC Subject (Compiled by Traugott Koch)

MARC 21 XML Schema and Dublin Core to MARC XML Stylesheet and Mapping between metadata formats (only catalogers would care)

Metadata Resources page from Colorado Digitization Program --viz.

14 April
The Incentives to Preserve Digital Materials: Roles, Scenarios, and Economic Decision-Making Brian Lavoie, OCLC, a white paper from April 2003.

4 June
google 'researchindex' search

The Semantic Web Research Group is a group of people working with technology inside the MIND LAB at University of Maryland --see Cancer Ontology (see NCI Metathesaurus Browser ("...a comprehensive biomedical terminology database, currently containing 850,000 concepts mapped to 1,500,000 terms by over 4,500,000 relationships")

Ontology Building : A Survey of Editing Tools by Michael Denny

An Ontology for Personal Information Stores (haystack, MIT)

Semantic Web - Annotation and Authoring ...see Looking for an ontology to work with? Try one of these downloadable ontologies...

The Third International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE'00) December 12 - 14, 2002 Singapore Ontology-Based Automatic Classification for the Web Pages: Design, Implementation and Evaluation (abstract) Rudy Prabowo, Mike Jackson, Peter Burden, University of Wolverhampton, Heinz-Dieter Knoell , Fachhochschule Nordostniedersachsen

In recent years, we have witnessed the continual growth in the use of ontologies in order to provide a mechanism to enable machine reasoning. This paper describes an automatic classifier, which focuses on the use of ontologies for classifying Web pages with respect to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Library of Congress Classification (LCC) schemes. Firstly, we explain how these ontologies can be built in a modular fashion, and mapped into DDC and LCC. Secondly, we propose the formal definition of a DDC-LCC and an ontology-classification-scheme mapping. Thirdly, we explain the way the classifier uses these ontologies to assist classification. Finally, an experiment in which the accuracy of the classifier was evaluated is presented. The experiment shows that our approach results an improved classification in terms of accuracy. This improvement, however, comes at a cost in a low overage ratio due to the incompleteness of the ontologies used.

Nicholas Berry (from http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/regrep/200301/msg00057.html) :

...taxonomies and classification systems are an order of magnitude apart. Here are some simplistic definitions. They progress from the actual to the theoretical in this manner:

Ontological Engineering from U. Buffalo

Barry Smith pares down 'philosophical ontology' : "In simple terms it seeks the classification of entities. Each scientific field will of course have its own preferred ontology, defined by the field's vocabulary and by the canonical formulations of its theories." (http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//articles/ontologies.htm) and goes on to this extension:
In the field of information processing there arises what we might call the Tower of Babel problem. Different groups of data-gatherers have their own idiosyncratic terms and concepts in terms of which they represent the information they receive. When the attempt is made to put this information together, methods must be found to resolve terminological and conceptual incompatibilities. Initially, such incompatibilities were resolved on a case-by-case basis. Gradually, however, it was realized that the provision, once and for all, of a common backbone taxonomy of relevant entities of an application domain would provide significant advantages over the case-by-case resolution of incompatibilities. This common backbone taxonomy is referred to by information scientists as an 'ontology'.

Mysteries of Metadata (Amit Sheth --110 slide presentation from Content World workshop, 2001)

Guided Tour of Ontology (John F. Sowa)

OntoGeo (Geospatial Ontology Research Group at University of Athens)

Ontologies Come of Age (Deborah L. McGuinness)

Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology (Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness)

What is an ontology?
An ontology is an explicit specification of some topic. For our purposes, it is a formal and declarative representation which includes the vocabulary (or names) for referring to the terms in that subject area and the logical statements that describe what the terms are, how they are related to each other, and how they can or cannot be related to each other. Ontologies therefore provide a vocabulary for representing and communicating knowledge about some topic and a set of relationships that hold among the terms in that vocabulary.

Ontology-Based Metadata: Transforming the MARC Legacy (1998) Peter C. Weinstein Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries

Digital Imaging Tutorial from Cornell

A Glossary of Digital Library Standards, Protocols and Formats by Susan Haigh (1998)

Preservation Management of Digital Libraries Handbook (Digital Preservation Coalition)

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