Metadata Watch Report #6 and Standards Framework Report #3

Section 5 - Conclusions

Many of the standardisation activities described above have been quite active over the summer months, releasing new versions of specifications and addressing longer-term strategic issues.

In the last year, many activities have started to think about their own future and the sustainability of their activities over a longer period of time. Many standardisation activities that have started out on the basis of enthusiasm from a small group of volunteers are now faced with the challenge to build sustainable organisations with sufficient funding to continue their tasks, thereby providing a stable basis for their growing user communities.

Perhaps partly because of this tendency towards finding a stable basis, and partly because of the growing interest in the Semantic Web vision, more and more initiatives are beginning to see the need for co-operation. Although the Semantic Web is far from realised and urgently needs to solve some of the technical issues (e.g. deployment of RDF), it indicates a strong long-term need for interoperability across various standards and applications.

In that context, many activities have started work on building metadata registries, such as in the Dublin Core and DOI. This issue will be taken on in the next Metadata Watch Report.

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 13 November 2001