The Changing Landscape of Networked Resource Description
| Pages | 7-10 |
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Published date | 01 January 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb047973 |
| Author | Stuart Weibel |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Internet Front
The Changing Landscape
of Networked Resource
Description
Stuart Weibel
with a sidebar by Judith Pearce
Weibel is
senior research scientist,
OCLC Office of Research, Dublin,
Ohio.
5046/~weibel >.
The first column in this series ap-
peared not long after the OCLC/
NCSA Metadata Workshop, an effort
to bring together experts from vari-
ous stakeholder communities from
the library, computer, and text-en-
coding communities. The objective
of this workshop was to forge a
consensus surrounding a light-
weight, core description record that
would be useful for locating Internet
resources, but that could be created
relatively inexpensively by authors
or others who were not necessarily
schooled in the nuances of conven-
tional cataloging.
For further information on the
Dublin Core, see the author's home
page:
URL: .
org/net/weibel >.
This event is notable for the con-
sensus that was achieved more than
for the 13 data elements that com-
prise the final core set. Only recent-
ly, however, has the seed planted in
March 1995 germinated and begun
to sprout tendrils in the resource de-
scription landscape.
The original intent for the work-
shop was to provide a description
scheme that might be included direct-
ly in Web documents: to promote
self-describing documents on the
Net. As things have developed, a
different, and perhaps more impor-
tant, function
has
emerged in support
of the notion of semantic interoper-
ability.
We
generally talk about interoper-
ability of systems: protocols that
make possible unambiguous exchang-
es of information between computer
systems. There is a higher-level
problem, however. Disparate data-
bases from communities with differ-
ent resource description models and
different vocabularies are not easily
searched without an understanding
of the intricacies of each. Users need
interoperability of meaning.
The Dublin Core may provide a
model that is simple enough to im-
plement across many different de-
scription schemes, and yet is rich
enough to provide useful searching.
This approach
was
discussed at some
length at a meeting of the NSF/
NASA/ARPA Digital Library Initia-
tive projects held in November in
Santa Barbara.1
A Story about Bee
Interoperability
Mike Raugh, of Interconnect Tech-
nologies Corporation, made the
following analogy at this meeting:
It seems to me that, in order for
metadata to be of
any
practical use,
a population of
users
must agree on
a common set of
syntactic
rules and
— NETWORKED RESOURCE DESCRIPTION — ISSUE 53 — 14:1 (1996) 7
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