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Dublin Core: 10 years of International Standardization

Dublin Core: 10 years of International Standardization. Stuart Weibel Senior Research Scientist OCLC Office of Research Visiting Scholar University of Washington iSchool http://weibel-lines.typepad.com January 2006. Who I am and why I am here.

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Dublin Core: 10 years of International Standardization

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  1. Dublin Core: 10 years of International Standardization Stuart Weibel Senior Research Scientist OCLC Office of Research Visiting Scholar University of Washington iSchool http://weibel-lines.typepad.com January 2006

  2. Who I am and why I am here • I belong to the Brownian Motion school of career development • Pharmacology • Professor of Biology • Information Science • OCLC Research since 1985 • All metadata, all the time since 1995 • I’m not the DC:Creator, but it pretty much created me

  3. IN SOOTH… The distance between theory and practice is always smaller in theory, than in practice Marshall T. Rose International standards are an exercise in closing this gap… finding compromises across domains, sectors, cultures, languages, time zones, and egos… all the while, adding value Best accomplished with people of good faith, imbued with passion and with the aid of a laptop in bars

  4. Dublin Core: The Beginning • A casual discussion at WWW-2 in Chicago, October of 1994 • Joseph Hardin, Yuri Rubinski, Stuart Weibel, Terry Noreault, & Eric Miller • How can we help make things on the Web easier to find? • OCLC & NCSA co-sponsored an invitational workshop in March of 1995

  5. Dublin Core: Starting Assumptions and Essential Features • Simple • true to a point: the elements are simple, the underlying model is not • Consensus-based • Crucial to early success, both in attracting expertise and deployment. Compare with GILS, for example • Bottom up • Based on the experience of practitioners, but hard to capture and capitalize on lessons learned • Cross-disciplinary • Central success factor

  6. Essential Features (continued) • The Web is the strategic application • On the mark • International • Also central success factor, but hard (25 languages in the Registry) • Lego-like modularity & extensibility • Partially realized promise • Application Profiles are the means • Syntax independence • An ongoing nightmare • Authors will describe their own works • Laughably naïve

  7. How we went about it • Invitational workshops at the start • Later, open workshops, and conferences • Conscious development of diversity (cross-disciplinary and international) • Openness (in participation and process) • The DC World Tour • Dublin, Warwick, Dublin, Canberra, Helsinki, Washington, Frankfurt, Ottawa, Tokyo, Florence, Seattle, Shanghai, Madrid, (Colima, Mexico) • Many secondary events – workshops, symposia, conference presentations on 5 continents

  8. Means and Methods • Face to face, Email, teleconferencing, publications • Working Groups organized around topics or tasks • A community Website (DublinCore.org) • Process – slow evolution, borrowed from others, leavened with (sometimes rancorous) experience • (IETF, W3C, MARBI) • Standardization (simple to more difficult) • Standardization is often a politicized process • IETF  NISO  ISO • National derivative standards (Australia, Finland…)

  9. Dublin Core Metadata Initiative The maintenance organization • Host (OCLC) – an accident of history • Directorate – Executive management team • Board of Trustees (9 seats) – strategic direction and oversight • Usage Board – the editors and arbiters of the standard • Affiliate Program – Governance and sustenance • Annual Conference (200 to 300 attendees)

  10. Affiliate Program • Affiliates are national entities – the DCMI local franchise • Staircase fees based on UN national GDP formula • Distribute costs, and share governance • Roughly half of the Board of Trustees seats • Must be committed owners (not just funders) for this to succeed

  11. Current Affiliates • Signed up • Finland (2003) • UK (2004) • Singapore (2005) • New Zealand (2005) • Expected affiliation this year: • two additional? • Expectation that DCMI will become an independent entity at some point

  12. Costs: very rough estimates • Personnel Costs – (Centralized) • 1.5 to 4 FTEs per annum over the life of the Initiative (currently ~2) • Personnel Costs – (Distributed) • 5 * .5 FTE 2.5 • 20 * .25 FTE 5 • 100 * .1 FTE 10 • 200 * .05 FTE 10 • Travel Costs (Distributed) • 250 * $1,000 USD per annum • Capital outlays • negligible

  13. Return on investment • DCMI has framed the international metadata discussion for a decade • Many standards have been built on top of the DC foundation, or derived from them • 7 countries formally, others informally • The EU and the UN • The US Government • Agrivoc • ANSI Standard for Description of Standards • BBC • PBS • Reuters, Siemens, many others • Knowledge management systems • VRA, LOM, others

  14. Connecting Value and Funding • Network value is proportional to adoption • Adoption is a function of value and ease of access and deployment • Open participation and free accessibility were (and are) central features of Web deployment • Those who harvest the value are generally not the ones who create it (an ongoing problem) • But… Pay to Play inhibits participation and uptake

  15. Community • The DC “Makers”: the core group of people with the expertise, and opportunity to contribute • Theorists and researchers – juicy problems • Practitioners – rules and procedures • DC “Takers”: the people who just want to use the stuff. “Just tell us how to do it….” • Communicating effectively to the community is a constant challenge • “Makers & takers” have different needs • Innovators and maintainers have different skills • Practitioners and theoreticians have different interests • Languages and community disparities are barriers

  16. The Forest • DCMI has always been under-capitalized (it could scarcely be otherwise) • Leadership, methodologies, and supporting processes were all midwifed amidst constant, hyper-change of the Web Decade • Constantly inventing for the past… what DCMI needs to do to add value in 2006 is different than 2003, and unrecognizable compared to 1998. • And there be dragons… politics, NIH syndrome, conflicting value propositions….

  17. If I were King of the Forest…(we’d have…) • A formal data model (we sort of do… finally… Andy Powell’s Abstract Model) • A coherent syntactic environment (pipe dream) • Reference applications (DC in a box) • Professional attention to documentation (especially application guides) • Professional attention to organizational development (PR, Strategy, Community ownership) • A successful approach to securing sustaining funds. Agencies love to support innovation, but rarely care to support standards maintenance

  18. And the point is…? • DCMI is a dynamic, international community of theoreticians and practitioners who work collaboratively within a formal process on practical problems in the metadata domain. • Does it matter if we stop, and how do we know? • If we continue, will The Commons approach sustain us?

  19. Ask me more • Mary Gates Hall 370 - D • And for the ongoing chronicle of my sabbatical, don’t forget to read my blog! http://weibel-lines.typepad.com

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