Metadata

ROADS as a basis for DC-in-a-Box?

 ROADS 

[This document is a part of DC-ROADS: ROADS as a (Dublin Core) Metadata Management Environment ]

What's DC-in-a-Box?

Stu Weibel posted a message to the dc-implementors mailing list [1] explaining what was needed in order to make it straightforward for information providers to make use of the Dublin Core. The software aspect of this was referred to as DC-in-a-Box and the documentation side as DC for Dummies.

The functional requirements were listed as: 

Create (and edit, update, remove) metadata records
unqualified or qualified
multiple language support

Generation of embedded metadata in HTML or RDF

Interconversion between DC and other standards (MARC, TEI, etc.)

Database support for indexing and searching DC 

Query processor to support searching of qualified or unqualified DC

Import and Export of DC from a database in either HTML or RDF

An example database to promote consistent 'best practice'

A users guide

Naming Management

DC-ROADS as a DC-in-a-Box?

The DC-ROADS approach described in [2] meets many of the requirements for DC-in-a-Box to some degree. It's not a complete solution but it does provide the framework for one. The main omission is the lack of support in the current implementation for qualified Dublin Core - this is something we hope to add.

The DC-ROADS approach does support the editing and management of metadata records. Generation of embedded metadata in HTML, RDF/XML and human-readable HTML is supported and support for other formats could be added.

Since ROADS uses IAFA templates there is already some support for conversion to and from other formats.

ROADS supports indexing of IAFA templates for searching via WHOIS++. Using a DC template in ROADS means that queries can be expressed in terms of the DC elements.

Import of DC is not yet implemented but harvesters could be incorporated as they become available. However if DC can be converted to (a format that can be converted to) IAFA templates then these can be used directly in ROADS.

Automatic metadata generation for resources would also be a valuable feature for a DC-in-a-Box and this has been implemented to some extent for DC-ROADS based on the Dublin Core generation features of DC-dot. A new version of DC-dot is being designed to improve modularity, in the future it should be possible for DC-ROADS to share code with DC-dot and/or incorporate DC-dot as the metadata editor.

References

[1] - DC-in-a-Box - http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-implementors/1999-04/0002.html
[2] - DC-ROADS - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/roads/metadata-mgmt/

[End - Return to: ROADS as a (Dublin Core) Metadata Management Environment ]

Web page authored and maintained by:
Page created on: 26-May-99
Page last revised on: Wednesday, 26-May-1999 07:59:20 UTC

[<A HREF="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/">Metadata</A>] [<A HREF="http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/">UKOLN</A>]