D24 - Metadata Watch Report #3

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Metadata Watch Report #3

Section 5 - Domain reports

5.1 Industry sector
5.2 Publishing sector
5.3 Audio-visual sector
5.4 Cultural Heritage sector
5.5 Educational sector
5.6 Academic sector
5.7 Geographical information sector

5.4 Cultural Heritage sector

Correspondent: Walter Koch, AIT

5.4.1 Current state of domain

Metadata in the field of Cultural Heritage relate to the description of ‘things’ as there are:

Real/scientific objects,
bibliographic (‘intellectual’) objects,
(digital/analogue) surrogates of objects (image/film),
objects instantiated by a (markup) language.

All these types of ‘things’ can be interrelated and appear in sub domains like: libraries, museums, and archives and are embedded in a space/time framework. Each sub domain has developed in the past separate (domain specific) meta data systems even there are similar ‘concepts’ which are described. Eg in the museum domain the term (meta data element) ‘creator’ (of a ‘thing’ called artwork) has similar meaning like ‘author’ in the library domain (creator of a ‘thing’ called book). Creator and author are domain specific meta data and up to now it was common to enumerate all meta data which are needed to describe things, relations, and dimensions. This leads to exhaustive lists of meta data elements which turned out to be a great obstacle when a common meta data system for all sub domains have to be developed. The adventure of the internet has made it popular to look for ‘resources’ in a general way independently of sub domains. The pragmatic way consists in mapping meta data elements into a new set of elements like MARC based meta data elements in a few ‘use’ attributes of the Z39.50 environment. A more radical approach is provided by the Dublin Core which maps domain specific elements into 15 ‘core’ elements. A more sophistic approach might be to look ‘behind the scenes’. If we take the term ‘author’ we can assume that this is a person or robot fulfilling a function (role) in relation to an object (‘thing’). This brings us slowly to the term ‘ontology’ which is defined in different ways. The Knowledge System Laboratory, Stanford defines ontology as "specification of concepts to be used for expressing knowledge". Basic elements of this framework (system ‘S-0’) are: Types of entities, Attributes and properties, Relations and functions, constraints. In the library domain (system ‘S-1’) the meta data element ‘author’ can be considered as a composition of specifications of basic S-0-elements: person (entity), create (function) related to a ‘thing’ (entity). This is a very rough and not precise clarification of the environment which meta data is part of. In the practice there are first steps in the museum area to leave conventional paths: The consortium of interchange of museum information (CIMI) has introduced the meta data elements: who, what, when, where (‘4w’) which can be considered as a domain independent conceptualisation of four entities (person, thing, time, place). If we look into the IDEF5 (integrated definition) methodology which distinguishes different levels of ontologies we can consider the ‘4w’ or Dublin Core elements belonging to a ‘domain ontology’ for the cultural heritage sector, meta data used in the library sub domain as part of a ‘practice ontology’ and metadata used within coin collections as part of a ‘site ontology’.

5.4.2 Main issues

Main issues in the CH-sector are still the harmonisation of meta data systems in subdomains. In the library sub domain the mapping of different MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing) standards into a unified system like UNIMARC reflects this effort. In the museum sub domain harmonisation efforts are much more difficult due to the heterogeneity of the objects (things) to be described. A coin needs quite different metadata elements compared to a painting. Specific attributes (eg. Genre in the arts environment) have been introduced to develop site specific domains. In the field of arts the AMICO (art museums image consortium) project has gained some importance; another system used in this area is called CDWA (categories for the description of works of art). The documentation group (CIDOC: International Committee for Documentation) of the International Council Of Museums (ICOM) has developed different system in the recent years: the ICOM ‘information categories’ which are based on (business) processes used in the museum world (this is related to some extent to the system (SPECTRUM) introduced by MDA (Museum Documentation Association). The CIDOC relational data model (based on collection management systems) defined also relations between basic ‘entities’ like person, event, and object. The latest development followed an object oriented approach and has led to the ‘Conceptual Reference Model’ (CRM). In the archive’s sub domain a new issue evolves: the organisation of a collection. This is reflected especially by the system developed the International Council of Archives (ICA) and called ISAD(G), ‘General International Standard Archival Description’. Another system, the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is quite frequently used to generate metadata based on the EAD-DTD. Special Professional Associations (eg the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives, IASA) have developed ‘site specific’ "cataloguing rules" on different levels (fonds, collections, etc).

5.4.3 Trends

Having in mind the three levels of ontologies as outlined under 5.4.1 (domain O., practice O., site specific O.) one can see that there are efforts on all levels: The issue of cross (sub) domain searching is on a broad basis covered by the Dublin Core (simple) meta data system. Practice Ontologies contain meta data which are undertaken a harmonisation process in specific sub domains (eg library, archive), and Site specific metadata are quite popular in the museum world due to the heterogeneity of the objects to be described. Dublin Core qualified might be a step into the direction of developing a meta data system which can be applied to all levels of ontologies but these efforts are just at the beginning.

>>Section 5.5 Educational sector

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 07 August 2001