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By Michael Day - October 2001
Michael Day reports on the First Austrian Metadata Seminar [1], Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, held in Vienna on 18 May 2001.
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On 18th May 2001 I attended the First Austrian Metadata Seminar in Vienna. The seminar attracted about 40-50 attendees, mostly from Austria, but also including some people from Slovakia and Switzerland. The meeting was held in a richly decorated room in the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture.
The workshop started with a welcome by Dr. Peter Seitz of the Ministry. Then Professor Walter Koch (CSC Austria, Graz) introduced the day with a presentation entitled "Ontology and metadata." In this he defined ontology as "an explicit, agreed specification about a shared conceptualisation" and compared this with definitions of metadata. Using some images of meaning triangles [2], the presentation looked briefly at object-oriented approaches to the semantics of meaning. Koch also introduced some DC-based mappings undertaken as part of the MODOK project. He noted that the real problem with mapping was accurately mapping the semantics of different schemes.
This was followed by a description by Angela Spinazze (CIMI) of CIMI projects and initiatives. These included CIMI collaboration with the Harmony project, the testing of the mda's SPECTRUM XML DTD, an initiative called "Handscape" that is investigating the use of wireless technologies for museum visitors and a CIMI-based test of the OAI protocol. Ms. Spinazze also gave some information on some forthcoming CIMI Institute events, including the CIMI-MCN conference to be held in Cincinnati in October, and implementers workshops on OAI and the SPECTRUM XML DTD to be held respectively in Milan (on the tutorial program at ICHIM01 in September) and Cincinnati.
My presentation on the SCHEMAS project followed this. I gave a fairly long presentation on European metadata developments and the SCHEMAS project. After a brief introduction to metadata, I looked in more detail at interoperability issues, subject gateways (with greater detail on the RDN and the Renardus project) and preservation metadata. My attempt was to give some indication of the variety of metadata initiatives that exist before introducing the SCHEMAS project itself.
After lunch, there was a presentation by Bart Degenhart Drenth (ADLiB Information Systems) on metadata from the point of a system developer. He argued that the term metadata should really only be used for data used for resource discovery (e.g. using the Dublin Core as a cross-domain element set) and not for other descriptive data, e.g. catalogue records. Metadata, therefore, should live alongside this other data and should be hidden from the user, described as deploying metadata by stealth. There was also a quick look at Z39.50 (not particularly useful for museum data), the OAI, and XML - described as the natural vehicle to support DC metadata because of its apparent longevity.
This was followed by a presentation by Mirna Willer (National and University Library, Zagreb, Croatia) on some experiences with DC in Croatia. This concentrated on interoperability issues (including mapping) and described the results of a survey on the presence of metadata in Croatian e-serials.
The final presentation was by Georg Güntner of Salzburg Research on the COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML) project [3]. This provided a general introduction to the project, with more detail on the system architecture and metadata conversions being used in the project. The project is forming a service that will broker (using Z39.50) to a network of distributed XML repositories.
Depending upon demand, there may be further workshops in this series. PowerPoint files of the presentations are available online [1].
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Michael
Day
Research Officer (Metadata)
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
m.day@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 1225 826724
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For citation purposes:
Day, M. "The First Austrian Metadata Seminar", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/austrian/>
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