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Metadata Watch Report #5

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 4 | section 5 ]

Section 3 - Co-operation

A first trend that can be observed is a trend towards co-operation between metadata activities and even concentration of efforts.

From their beginnings in the last five years, many metadata activities and standardisation efforts have been based on specific requirements with a domain or group of co-operating organisations. The specific requirements were formulated with very specific goals in mind, providing services to a specific audience.

In the last year or so, we can see a gradual blurring of boundaries. Even if projects had a fairly clear idea of their objectives when they set out, they are finding out that there are other communities with comparable objectives that may be served by their solution, originally designed for one community. For example, when solutions for rights management are developed for single-media resources (text, images, music), the same solution may be applicable to multimedia resources.

When boundaries blur, metadata solution developers are finding out that others are also busy designing metadata solutions in domains that are overlapping with theirs. And there is in fact a continuum of overlapping domains: museums, libraries, archives, book publishing, multimedia publishing, broadcasting of moving images, still images, educational resources, government information, geospatial information, statistical datasets; it is not difficult to identify types or genres of resources that are relevant to two, three of the domains mentioned. Yet many of these domains have their own metadata approaches.

In this situation, metadata approaches start to compete for adoption within a certain community. When this happens, and metadata projects opt for either one or the other, we will see 'islands of interoperability' emerge where exchange of information between adopters of one approach is relatively easy, and exchange with others is, at best, more complex.

Such a development is obviously contrary to the concept of interoperability, and fortunately, many developers of metadata approaches have come to this realisation in recent times. They are starting to feel that it is a waste of (scarce) human resources to duplicate effort to solve the same problems and especially that it is a waste to try and win the competition and become THE metadata approach.

That having been said, it also does not make sense to strive for a single, all-encompassing metadata approach. Looking at various approaches, it can be seen that these are all firmly rooted in requirements from a certain constituency, and that no single approach would be able to meet all these diverse requirements.

In other words, we need to accept that there are and will be different metadata approaches. Some of those may be applicable to vary narrow domains or even to single organisations, others may be applicable across a scientific or business domain, while others may have relevance on a very broad level.

There are two models that we can see happening when two metadata approaches meet:

  1. Formal co-operation between standards developers, where the attempt is to co-operate on the highest level, harmonising the approaches. In some cases, this can lead to the de-fact merger of metadata approaches (e.g. OeBF and EBX), to the development of a single international standard (e.g. IEEE LOM from IMS and Ariadne) or to the signing of Memoranda of Understanding (e.g. DCMI and IEEE LOM)
  2. Bottom-up mapping exercises, where the attempt is to describe the mechanism of converting metadata from one standard to another. These exercises are usually done by users in a domain that is faced with a choice between two standards, or where domain-specific metadata (e.g. MPEG) needs to interoperate with cross-domain metadata (e.g. the Dublin Core)

In the first category above, a further meeting between DCMI and IEEE/IMS will take place in August in Ottawa, to discuss further practical steps on the basis of the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed in 2000.

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 | section 4 | section 5 ]

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 01 October 2001