Metadata

CORES - A Forum on shared metadata vocabularies

Introduction

The CORES project was funded as part of the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme, under Key Action 3 managed by the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission. CORES was a 15 month project which ran from April 2002 to June 2003.

The IST Project Factsheet on CORES was available in the RTD Projects Database of CORDIS at: http://www.cordis.lu/ist/projects.htm [no longer available]

More detailed information about the CORES project was available on the project's website: http://www.cores-eu.net/. [live version no longer available; older versions available from the Internet Archive]

The central objective of the CORES project was to encourage the sharing of metadata semantics. It was intended that CORES would address the need to reach consensus on a data model for declaring semantics of metadata terms in a machine-readable way. The premise was that consensus on the ground-rules for declaring standard definitions of terms, as well as on local usage and adaptations, would enable a diversity of standards to "play together" in an integrated, machine-understandable Semantic Web environment.

In order to achieve this level of interoperability, CORES intended to support applications re-using and adapting terms maintained by key organizations and standardisation initiatives

Project partners with UKOLN:

• Project Coordinator: PricewaterhouseCoopers, Luxembourg (PwC)

• Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e. V (Fraunhofer Society for the Advancement of Applied Research), Germany (FhG)
• Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary (MTA SZTAKI)

Work on CORES at UKOLN:

UKOLN contributed to all workpackages in the CORES project.

WP2: Declaring core vocabularies and profiles

WP Leader: UKOLN.

CORES intended to bring major standardisation groups together with international initiatives that were exploring the use of metadata schema registries. In order to encourage uptake for methods of declaring "profiles" of application-specific usage, CORES built on the work of SCHEMAS, which had defined a model for declaring such usage in Resource Description Framework (RDF) [1]. CORES promoted use of this model by a critical mass of projects and services by holding a hands-on "profile-writing" workshop with implementers.

Reference

[1] Thomas Baker, Makx Dekkers, Rachel Heery, Manjula Patel, Gauri Salokhe, "What Terms Does Your Metadata Use? Application Profiles as Machine-Understandable Narratives", Journal of Digital Information (October 2001): http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/viewFile/40/43

Selected project outputs:

Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston, Csaba Fülöp and Andras Micsik, "Metadata schema registries in the partially Semantic Web: The CORES experience." DC-2003, Seattle, USA: http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/pubs/article/view/729

Thomas Baker and Makx Dekkers, "Identifying metadata elements with URIs: The CORES Resolution." D-Lib magazine, July/August 2003: http://dx.doi.org/10.1045/july2003-baker

UKOLN staff who worked on the CORES project:

Pete Johnston

Interoperability Officer
E-mail: p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk

Manjula Patel

Research and Development
E-mail: m.patel@ukoln.ac.uk

Rachel Heery

Assistant Director (Team Leader, Research & Development)
E-mail: r.m.heery@ukoln.ac.uk