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Metadata Watch Report #1

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Section 3 - Domain reports

3.1 Industrial sector
3.2 Publishing sector
3.3 Audio-visual sector
3.4 Educational sector
3.5 Academic sector
3.6 Research sector
3.7 Geographical information sector

3.6 Research sector

State of the domain (trends, issues)

The scope of this first watch report was research institutes and professional societies. We spent some time examining the Web sites of major private research institutes, such as Rand, PARC, SRI, and Mitre. Trying to locate metadata activities through the Web sites of corporate laboratories seemed not to be very cost-efficient -- apart from the occasional white paper on corporate extranets (General Electric) or data warehousing (Rand), our efforts turned up little of interest. We also looked at the titles of papers in several digital library and Web conferences for possible leads.

We examined but did not make full Watch records for projects and Web services that simply announce that they use metadata. Rather, we focused on projects and services that make a point of publishing their schemas, participate in standards-making activities, or otherwise promote metadata, whether with software tools or with working groups.

In Europe, research laboratories such as Fraunhofer and the members of ERCIM (European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, of which GMD is a member) typically participate in metadata activities as minor partners in national or European projects, which seemed out of scope for our information-gathering.

One important project among European research laboratories is the DELOS Network of Excellence, a Fifth Framework project (2000-2003) organized by ERCIM, whose Standardisation Forum provides a context for ad-hoc working groups to address issues related to the deployment of digital library standards, particularly in the area of metadata.

Nordic countries have long been active in promoting metadata. The Nordic Metadata Project, a cooperative venture of the Nordic countries and an organizer of the Fifth Dublin Core Workshop in 1997, pioneered the notion of a metadata-based distributed index across national boundaries. In particular, the NetLab at Lund University has been a center of technical research and development of metadata tools and harvesting robots. NetLab has been active in the European DESIRE project since 1996 and maintains SAFARI, a search engine that harvests Dublin-Core-based metadata embedded in documents located on the Web servers of participating organisations, which include universities and public research organisations in Sweden.

The SAFARI Project provides particularly good documentation of its schema, with crosswalks to related schemas.

Among the professional societies, the German Mathematical Society (DMV) has taken a leadership role internationally in defining and using metadata to create a Web portal of mathematics resources. In the context of an Information and Communication (IuK) initiative among German professional societies, the MathNet Project has created a search engine that indexes materials held at a wide range of institutions -- primarily in Germany, but now including France, Austria, Italy, Sweden, and USA. The indexes are structured by type of material -- eg, MPRESS for preprints and PERSONA MATHEMATICA for home pages -- with a general index, SIGMA, that redundantly captures everything held in the more specific indexes.

MathNet encourages the use of (Dublin-Core-based) metadata by distributing a free metadata editor and displaying search hits that have metadata in a separate result set, making clear the difference in quality. The project is governed by a steering committee and related committees of the German Mathematical Union (DMV) and the German Information and Communication (IuK) Initiative.

MathNet was a major focus of a workshop in Berkeley in December 1999 on the "Future of Mathematical Communication". At that workshop, the Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC) of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) decided to internationalise the MathNet initiative. CEIC forsees the development of an international Web service based on the German MathNet model. In addition to the countries mentioned above, this committee includes representatives of Austria, Canada, Brazil, Russia, China, the UK, India, and Australia.

The EULER Project of the Telematics for Libraries Programme aims at providing a "one-stop shopping site" for users interested in mathematics. It differs from efforts such as MathNet inasmuch it includes "for pay" resources from commercial publishers and document delivery services. This diversity of resources is integrated via descriptions based on Dublin Core.

Physicists are undertaking a similar project, but the role of metadata here is less clear from the materials I have seen. The Institute of Physics (successor of a Physical Society founded in 1874) has created an extensive portal of information on physics, including PhysicsNet, a buyer's guide for physics-related products and services; PhysicsWeb, a subscription newsletter; an online bookstore; and several electronic journals (for a fee). This site would have been represented by a Watch record were it not that the technical documentation, which includes a reference to Dublin Core, seems to date from 1996.

The PhysNet project -- a network of research centers and university departments for physics centered to some degree on the European Physical Society -- seems closer to the goals of MathNet. Its server is located at the University of Oldenburg, likewise a partner in the German IuK initiative. Like MathNet, PhysNet is creating a portal for preprints and other information in the physics field in cooperation with national societies and local institutions in Germany, Australia, Ireland, Denmark, Australia, Korea, Hungary, India, and Russia. From the materials I have seen, however, the role of metadata in this project is less clear.

The project Dissertations Online, funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG), is creating national standards for cataloging and providing access to dissertations produced at German universities. Project members include German regional library networks, university libraries, and Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Since 1998, dissertations in digital form are deposited and archived at Die Deutsche Bibliothek.

The metadata schema for dissertations, METADISS, is available on the Web (http://deposit.ddb.de/metadiss.htm). It was developed in consultation with German scientific professional societies and is based on Dublin Core. Distinctions are made between bibliographic and discipline-specific metadata versus intellectual property rights metadata and between metadata prepared by the author and metadata prepared by professional catalogers.

A sub-project at the University of Duisburg is continuing the development of metadata for dissertations. For example, metadata packages are needed for multimedia components such as video sequences. Expected products of the project include: standard DTDs for dissertations in several fields; agreements on standard document formats for digital dissertations; workflow models for the authentification and archiving of dissertations; and strategies for the non-commercial and commercial use of dissertations on the Web or CD-ROMs.

In Germany, the activities of professional societies in the area of metadata are coordinated by a the umbrella initiative Information and Communication (IuK). Relevant activities include MathNet, PhysNet, the DFG-funded project Dissertations Online, and the German Educational Server. Representatives of these and other projects meet in an IuK Working Group on Metadata and Classification. More recently, IuK has become a member of W3C. Founded with a vision of distributed repositories for academic information, the IuK initiative emphasizes simple standards and cost-effective methods.

IuK operates within the context of the broader funding framework Global Info. Global Info, widely known as The German Digital Library Project, is the result of a 1996 program of the German Ministry for Education, Science, Research, and Technology (BMBF) called "Information as the Raw Material for Innovation". This program was based on the notion that knowledge was the key to future prosperity in Germany, and that the key to knowledge lay in delivering richly structured information to the desktop of every scientist and technician. From the outset, Global Info has emphasized the necessity of cooperation between scientists, libraries, information centers, publishers, and end users.

Also worthy of mention is the software development effort that has created Protégé, an editing environment for generating knowledge-based systems from formal ontologies. A product of digital library projects at Stanford University, it has been adopted by many projects as a basis for further development, as listed on their Web page. This seems at present to be one of the leading editors for RDF structures.

>>Section 3.7 Geographical information sector

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

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Last updated: 07 August 2001