Mike Crandall is Technology Manager for the Libraries and Public Access to Information Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mike recently reported on this event in a virtual roundtable, one of several in the "Taxonomy Integration" series, sponsored by the Society of Knowledge Base Publishers.

What is the Dublin Core Circles?
The 2002 Dublin Core annual conference and workshop marked the beginning of a new effort by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to involve members of the corporate world in the evolution and application of the Dublin Core standard. The first meetings of two DCMI Circles of Interest were held on Monday, October 14, 2002, followed the next day by a panel session with several members of the Circles presenting their initial observations and conclusions to the wider conference.

The concept of Circles originated in the DCMI Board of Trustees discussions last spring, as the members of the Board tried to grapple with issues surrounding the adoption and implementation of the Dublin Core standard within the commercial world. Because of the rapid pace of change in a commercial setting, there is an inherent conflict between slowly evolving standards and the immediate need for a working model to use for business purposes. To address this, the Board came up with the idea of a self-directed forum, run by and for members of the corporate world using Dublin Core, to share best practices and provide direct input to the standard from their point of view.

Initial contacts were made with a number of corporations, and as feedback was received, the concept began to take shape. Two circles were initially proposed for the October meeting. One focused on companies using Dublin Core for their intranets and extranets (the Corporate Circle). The other focused on information providers (publishers and aggregators) who might find their customers asking for Dublin Core compliant metadata with their offerings (the Information Providers Circle). During the Monday meetings of these groups, it became clear that there was a strong interest within the Corporate Circle in continuing the conversation on an ongoing basis. The Information Provider Circle, on the other hand, was extremely interested in hearing what the corporate consumers of their content had to say, but not very keen on continuing a discussion among themselves.

Who participated
The following table lists the organizations that originally expressing interest in the Circles meeting. Those that actually attended are shown with asterisks.

Issues raised
Issues raised by participants in the Corporate Circle included the following:

• Effective implementation of content and document management systems, portals, search engines, and knowledge management applications. Software vendors do not provide any meaningful Dublin Core schema support.
• Generating standard attribute value sets including taxonomy, thesaurus, and controlled vocabularies. Standard attribute value sets would be enormously valuable.
• In corporations, knowledge management and corporate IT are the Dublin Core users, not the librarians/information service providers. Applications of Dublin Core occur mostly in the Corporate web presence, not the corporate intranet.
• Demonstrating the value of industry standards to the organization. Collaboration is not part of the corporate culture, competition is.
• Identifying the business problems that DC can help solve—

- Engineering effective content creation scenarios and adding value to that content
- Generating top hits in web searches
- Ensuring document-level security (controlling access)

In addition, a number of corporate user needs were identified:

• Industry best practice. Case histories of process (and its cost) to arrive at corporate metadata standards. Documentation of opportunity cost. ROI of applying metadata standards (revenue), duplicate storage (liability/IP exposure & cost). Benefits of facilitated, distributed data hosting.
• ISO/NISO validation.
• ROI cost benefits, e.g., studies that show the cost before and after Dublin Core has been adopted.
• Validation of Dublin Core compliance by vendors. Compliance validation service, recommendation report, or vendor self-validation tools. Bottom line is a need for software tools.
• Input to DC usage, e.g., specialized attribute value lists, Type encoding extensions.
• Dublin Core enabled search engines--Alta Vista, Autonomy, Verity, Inktomi.

Future development
Out of the discussions, some potential ideas for the scope, future work, and actions for the Corporate Circle evolved:

• Development of controlled vocabularies at a global level
• Vocabulary-enabled search services
• Influencing Internet search engines
• Documentation, e.g., on how to integrate a vocabulary with a search engine
• Obtaining vendor subsidies for work from SAP, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, etc.
• Influencing information providers to provide Dublin Core formatted content.
• Convening a face-to-face meeting once a year.
• Identifying and working on what’s missing but relevant to DC, e.g., a document lifecycle element could become a corporate extension.
• Other potential host organizations are: ITIMG (Industrial Technical Information Managers Group), SLA.

Many of these same issues and future needs were reinforced the following day in the panel discussion, with Julie Roach (GSK), Claus Jäkel (Siemens), Sandy Hostetter (Rohm Haas), and Judi Vernau (The Stationary Office) participating. Their comments are summarized below:

Follow-up
The DCMI directorate is in the process of reviewing this very substantive input and will be planning next steps to facilitate the continued discussion of these issues and begin to work toward achieving some of the action items laid out in the meetings in Florence. One of the first actions will be the establishment of an electronic communication forum for those interested in participating in the ongoing conversation around these issues. All those who expressed initial interest in the meeting and those who have subsequently indicated a desire to be included will be automatically subscribed to this forum, and notified at the time.

To achieve the full objective of the circle, the members will need to decide how to facilitate their joint efforts to provide some of the deliverables discussed in the meeting. There is clear interest from the information providers in hearing from this group. It is likely that many of the software providers (authoring tools and search engine providers) would also respond to a unified request for features related to metadata management if it is presented in a disciplined way from an organization such as DCMI. DCMI itself is also very interested in getting requirements from this group for future services and directions associated with the Dublin Core standard itself and will be looking forward to the additional input expected to come from the Circle.

Over the next six months, the future path of the Corporate Circle will be developing. If you would like to be part of this effort, and are interested in sharing your ideas, thoughts and resources on activities related to the use of Dublin Core and other metadata standards in the corporate environment, please contact Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies.

Created on November 25 | Last updated on June 15, 2009