Introduction

This was the first in a series of four workshops which will take place throughout the duration of the project. The title of the workshop was "Combining multiple metadata standards in implementations: User experience and requirements"

Aims of the First Workshop

Projects and services that use metadata face a common challenge: how can they make best use of existing standards to meet the specific requirements of their applications? One often needs to use parts of one standard, parts of another, and invent some local parts to fill in the gaps. Standards documentation typically provides no guidance on how that standard may be combined with others in practice.

This workshop aimed to provide metadata implementors with an opportunity to learn from the experience and project objectives of their peers. In order to design more effective Web pages, training materials, and databases on these issues, the SCHEMAS project is particularly interested in discussing questions such as the following:

How do you plan to go about defining your metadata schemas?

Is your project oriented to particular standards or to particular ways of

How do you plan to publish or disclose your local metadata schemas?

Where do you look to find out how projects in your field or discipline are defining their schemas?

What kinds of introductory or course materials, handbooks, user guides, or Web databases have you found useful? What other kinds of material are needed?

To what extent must your metadata schemas present themselves to users in multiple languages? How have you addressed this issue in practice?

We would like to identify projects that have a particular interest in metadata, and a requirement to implement a metadata schema, whether this is for resource discovery, rights management, collection description, user or service profiles etc, and whatever the element set of choice, be it Dublin Core, IEEE LOM, GILS, indecs etc.

Agenda

The programme for the workshop, as well as the original call for participation can be found on the SCHEMAS website at: http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws1/agenda.html

The presentations given during the workshop and the conclusions of the breakout sessions can also be found linked in from the workshop programme.

Brainstorm: What do we want from a schema registry?

An outline and conclusions from the brainstorm session is available from the workshop agenda at: http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws1/agenda.html

Demonstration of Prototype Registries

Two example registries were demonstrated during the workshop. The first was a prototype developed under the DESIRE Project (http://www.desire.org/) which can be viewed at http://desire.ukoln.ac.uk/registry/. The second was a metadata registry developed as part of the Meta-Lib Project (http://www2.sub.uni-goettingen.de/)

Break-outs

The conclusions from the break-out sessions can be found at:

http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws1/agenda.html

Breakout One: Defining schemas in use

Is your project oriented to particular metadata standards or to a particular combination of standards? Where do you look for information and guidance? How do you plan to go about defining your metadata schemas? What is your timescale for finalising your metadata schema?

Breakout Two: Sharing and declaring schema

Is there a group with which you particularly need to align your schema? How can you work towards aligning schema? How do you plan to publish or disclose your local metadata schemas?

Breakout Three: Multilingual requirements

To what extent must your metadata schemas present themselves to users in multiple languages? How have you addressed this issue in practice, how might it be addressed?

Breakout Four: Finding information about schema

Where do you look to find out how projects in your field or discipline are defining their schemas? What kinds of introductory or course materials, handbooks, user guides, or Web databases covering the overall topic of metadata schema have you found useful? What other kinds of material are needed?

Training Materials

The materials collected during the workshop, which include presentations and conclusions from the brainstorm session and the break-out sessions, form the initial set of training materials resulting from the first workshop. These may later be enhanced under workpackage 7 which is concerned with the provision of training materials.

Costs Incurred

The costs of the workshop were within the allocated budget.

Conclusions from the Workshop

Feedback during the workshop indicated that the workshop was proving to be a valuable forum for the delegates in which they could discuss issues pertaining to schemas and metadata in general.

The overall conclusions from the workshop can be found in the workshop programme which is on the website. To summarise, they indicate that SCHEMAS could play a valuable role in providing accurate information about on-going work and the registration of schemas and profiles.

With regard to a metadata schema registry, it was apparent that the SCHEMAS registry should place a priority on making available human-readable information, but that the options for machine readability should be kept open by making the registry RDF/XML compliant. The registry should also cater for multilingualism and register schemas (and possibly controlled vocabularies) in multiple languages.

The approach of the SCHEMAS project would therefore be to define services to various types of users, set up a distributed registry with single node, encourage participation and contributions from schema implementors, co-operate with other registry activities, extend the involvement of domains beyond libraries and education and extend the involvement of standards beyond the Dublin Core.

Concluding Remarks

The workshop contributed to a comprehensive list of user requirements which are further elaborated in document D71: User Requirement Specifications.

Considerable feedback was also received with regard to the functionality that users would expect the SCHEMAS registry to provide. These are further discussed in document T5.1: Functional Specification for a Metadata Registry.

It should be noted that a significant effort went into formulating a list of invitees to the first workshop. It is proposed that a database should be maintained listing all potential invitees and contacts which will grow with the project and hence reduce the effort required in locating contacts for the remaining workshops.

As a result of the workshop the schemas-forum mailing list has expanded considerably. All the delegates who attended the workshop are now on this discussion list.

It has become apparent that a more effective way of communicating with European projects is required. It was felt that information regarding the workshop had not adequately filtered through to the relevant people on the projects.

It is also proposed that a copy of this workshop report be made publically available on the SCHEMAS website.

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 18 July 2000