Application Profiles interoperable friend or foe Rachel Heery

Application Profiles: interoperable friend or foe? Rachel Heery Michael Day TEL Milestone Conference Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Themes of the presentation • Increase in schema creation activity • Tension between differentiation and interoperability • Counterbalances to proliferation of portals – – sharing schema regard for end-user requirements controlled evolution of vocabularies cross standard interoperability • Rôle of information professionals. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Definitions. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Definition of Element Set An element set is coherent bounded set of terms formulated as a basis for metadata creation • Designed for particular purpose e. g. domain-specific, resource description, rights • Identifies designated authority TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Definition of Schema An schema is a structured representation that defines and identifies terms in an element set • • Provides authoritatve declaration of terms Indicates semantic relationship of terms Supports unique identification of terms Typically schema will be expressed on RDF or XML schema language TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Definition of Application Profile An application profile is a schema which consists of terms (metadata elements) drawn from one or more element sets optimised for a particular local application • Application profiles are declarations of usage • Application profile reuse terms already defined elsewhere; or use terms from a local element set TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Schema Declares set of terms with identifiers, definitions and comments Application profile schema Declares set of terms used in particular application or domain Self reliant Optimised for that application or domain Means of declaring ‘new terms’ Re-uses terms from elsewhere Means of declaring terms that an application uses and understands TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Increase in schema creation activity TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Optimisation and adaptation MARC local fields • 9 XX and XX 9 tags Z 39. 50 application profiles • sub-sets of standard appropriate for application area IMS • UK Further Education extension Dublin Core domain specific elements and qualifiers TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

New application profiles RSLP Collection Level description DC Government DC Libraries DC Education Australian Government Locator Service Food and Agricultural Organisation European Environment Agency Renardus EASEL, Schoolnet Various UK educational initiatives etc. , etc. TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Sharing schemas. . . • Standard solutions are published but • Implementers’ adaptations/extensions are not made widely available Has this led to unnecessary proliferation of schemas, to duplication and repetition? TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Characterising requirements Implementers need to declare various characteristics of their schema: • terms used • whether a term is mandatory • any refined definitions of terms from existing namespaces • which schemes must be used for content • other rules for content TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

How to share. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Best practice for sharing schema "What terms does your metadata use? " Need to express in “comparable“ way: – Which standard terms are used in an application – How terms are adapted or used locally – Other related usage notes TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Registries of schemas To give access to schemas – searching and browsing – names, definitions, usage – relationships between terms Support evolution of schemas – top-down (standards authorities) – bottom-up (real world usage) Disclosure, discovery, effective reuse, harmonisation TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Publishing schemas and application profiles Why? • To inform and promote • To provide authoritative version • To facilitate inter-working To support • Evolution • Alignment TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Registries Meta. Form at the State and University Library in Göttingen MEG registry serving UK Metadata for Education group DCMI registry prototypes: access to information on DCMI terms SCHEMAS registry EC funded, serving European projects (soon to be CORES!) TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Balancing standardisation and differentiation. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Increase in schema creation activity Implementers must decide on appropriate metadata for a new service or system. . . but what? Is there a single answer? • Re-use • Interoperability • Users want coherent services • But all want new, innovative services Tension between alignment and differentiation TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Difficult issues! People are keen to reach consensus, but…. Inconsistent approach in practice • When should implementers create new terms? • When should implementers try to add terms to existing element sets? Varying practice about creation of local element sets Messy issue of data models TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Is a new DCMI term required? [Based on Stuart Sutton’s Action Chart!] When faced with requirement for schema: – Use existing single schema where possible – else – Will use of domain specific scheme meet requirement? – else – Will term from another schema meet requirement? – else – Will a new domain-specific qualifier meet practice? – else – Create local term? /Recommend schema extension? Then declare terms. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Meeting user requirements. . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Quality control How well does metadata meet needs of user? • Needs to be awareness of quality and information retrieval issues in schema design Some suggested criteria: • effectiveness of retrieval • effectiveness of display of retrieved record • cost of metadata creation • barriers to interoperability TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Evolution of element sets TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Managing evolution of element sets Ordered procedure for new terms • approval process • historical record of changes Top-down (committee structure) or bottomup (feedback from usage statistics Possibilities for automation? • Registration of new terms • harvesting existing metadata TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Cross standard interoperability TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Collaboration between standardisation bodies • acknowledging overlapping semantics • honouring namespaces i. e. re-use elements from existing element sets • reach consensus on ‘core elements’ • reach consensus on data models for declaring schema • collaborate on registries This is the agenda of CORES project! TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Information on standards Practitioners need accessible information • Overviews of standards development • Reviews of schema-creating activities Need information on inter-relation of standards in relation to schema e. g. Z 39. 50 attribute sets and DC schema Need commentary and guidance information TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

The rôle of the information professional? • Tradition of collaboration within library world • Ability to articulate needs of end-user communities • Expertise in information retrieval techniques • Ability to create user-friendly, accessible documentation • Healthy scepticism of technology? TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Can contribute to • Lobbying for infrastructure for sharing schema, moving from projects to services • Lobbying for tools • Helping build tools • Involvement in standardisation process • Putting in quality control • Considering costs, developing business models. . . TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Further reading Rachel Heery & Manjula Patel, “Application Profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas, ” Ariadne, 25, September 2000: http: //www. ariadne. ac. uk/issue 25/app-profiles/ Thomas Baker, Makx Dekkers, Rachel Heery, Manjula Patel & Gauri Salokhe, “What terms does your metadata use? Application Profiles as machine-understandable narratives, ” Journal of Digital Information, 2 (2), November 2001: http: //jodi. ecs. soton. ac. uk/Articles/v 02/i 02/Baker/ Heike Neuroth & Traugott Koch, “Metadata mapping and application profiles: approaches to providing the cross-searching of heterogeneous resources in the EU project Renardus, ” Proceedings of DC-2001: http: //www. nii. ac. jp/dc 2001/proceedings/ SCHEMAS Registry: http: //www. schemas-forum. org/registry/ DCMI Registry: http: //wip. dublincore. org: 8080/registry/Registry CORES: http: //www. cores-eu. net TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002

Acknowledgements UKOLN is funded by Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK higher and further education funding councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath, where it is based. http: //www. ukoln. ac. uk/ TEL Milestone Conference, Frankfurt am Main, 29 -30 April 2002