Monthly News

Events attended

• I attended the Z39.50 Implementor's Group, or ZIG, meeting in Stockholm. This group is the informal collection of vendors and implementors who meet once every six months or so to progress aspects of the standard. Topics discussed included Z39.50's new attribute architecture, the almost finalised work on exchanging Holdings information via Z39.50, and a couple of Profiles including one for utilising thesauri in Z39.50 and the International Interoperability Profile discussed below. For more info on Z39.50 in general, check out an article I'm writing for Ariadne (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/) that's due to appear during September.

  The ZIG is an important group, and one that non-library communities do not always influence enough (Bill Moen's excellent work pushing through the CIMI Profile being one obvious exception). UK representation at this meeting was limited to myself, Kevin Gladwell from the British Library, Dennis Lynch from SilverPlatter, and a student from the University of Kent. It's something I feel that we should continue to have a presence in, and I think we should make a point of trying to get Interoperability Focus - or someone - to most meetings. The next meeting is in January 2000 in Texas, and this one will be important for finalising the International Interoperability Profile (see below). Then there's one in Belgium, then Washington at the very end of 2000.

  I've offered the UK for the summer 2001 meeting.

• Straight after the Stockholm meeting, ten of us locked ourselves away in a Bath hotel for three days to finalise work on the International Interoperability Profile. This Profile is now called the Bath Profile (for obvious reasons), and we intend to release a public draft for detailed comments in the second half of September. We would very much welcome comments from all of you... or from staff/colleagues who might have useful inputs to offer. The meeting web page is at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/z3950/int_profile/bath/, and the new draft will appear there as soon as it is available.

  The Profile addresses a clear need to bring some degree of standardization to the offerings of various Z39.50 vendors, and does this by prescribing behaviour quite tightly for a number of 'key' searches (title, author, subject-type searches) in both the Bibliographic and Cross-Domain functional areas.

  The Profile is likely to prove important to the emerging DNER in the UK, and a number of existing national and regional Profiles in Europe and elsewhere have already suggested that they will adopt the Bath Profile as their Core... ensuring a useful level of cross-Profile interoperability even if they add other local functionality and embellishments on top.

  All round, an extremely successful and valuable meeting. Many thanks to JISC for finding the money to make it possible for UKOLN to organize this.

  Let's hope Interoperability Focus can continue to do this kind of thing... bringing together small groups of experts to produce focussed tools of genuine benefit to a wide community.

Work in Progress

• The newly named Bath Profile (above) is now proceeding rapidly, with Bill Moen putting a lot of work into a draft which we hope to release widely later in September.
• In Dublin Core, work continues on agreeing a 'core' set of qualifiers, which will allow users to refine the meaning of the basic 15 elements. Also, the Executive Committee is doing good work in refining the rough edges of the current process, and the Programme Committee for the next DC meeting in Frankfurt is proceeding well with the programme.
• Following a meeting in Boston last week, the conflicting statuses of two World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working groups (XML-SCHEMA and RDF- SCHEMA) appears to have been resolved. A joint communique is due later this month to make all clear. In the light of this, the stalled document on Dublin Core and RDF written by myself, Eric Miller (OCLC) and Dan Brickley (ILRT) can finally move forward.
• Going some way towards addressing confusions and conflicts between the Dublin Core and the educational community's standards (such as those implemented by IMS), the Dublin Core Executive Committee this month established a special working group, dc-education, to address educational applications of DC. More information on this is available from http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-education.

  Also this month, release 1.0 of the IMS metadata specification finally became available. It's big. Discussions continue with Fretwell Downing, British Telecom and others over ways in which apparent differences between IMS and Dublin Core can be resolved. A teleconference is currently scheduled for next week.

• Also this month, the public interoperability list was set up. This list now has 298 members from around the world.
• Still writing the Z39.50 article for Ariadne. Due this week, I think.

  Also doing a report on the ZIG for Exploit Interactive, and trying to find time to resurrect a 75% finished paper on metadata, which I quite liked a year ago...