Thomas Baker

Topic

Cataloging for the Web: Dublin Core and the Resource Description Framework

Abstruct

Since the rise of the World Wide Web in 1994, libraries and information providers share an Internet Commons. As in a linguistically complex land, the content providers there use a wide variety of incompatible formats and cataloging rules to describe their information. But likewise since 1994, there has been a growing initiative on the part of national libraries, government agencies, publishers, and universities to develop a deliberately simple "pidgin" set of metadata (cataloging) elements that is interoperable with these various systems. This has resulted in the Dublin Core -- a set of fifteen basic categories with well-understood meanings like "Author" and "Title". This two-page standard has already been translated into nine languages. In parallel with the Dublin Core effort, the World-Wide Web community, together with software companies such as Netscape and Microsoft, has developed the Resource Description Framework (RDF) -- a standard format for encoding the metadata of Web documents, library catalogs, and electronic commerce applications. RDF uses XML, the simplified SGML that is positioned to replace HTML and word-processing formats as the standard format for documents on the Web. Together, the Dublin Core and RDF could provide a metadata system that is consistent across a wide range of applications and domains, no more complex than it needs to be, usable by both experts and non-experts, interoperable with existing library catalogs and legacy databases, and coherent across many languages. This tutorial will provide an introduction to the issues, tools, and prospects.

CV

Dr. Thomas H. Baker holds a masters in library science from Rutgers University (1993) and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University (1989). As a social scientist, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on industrial development in rural Northeastern Italy and returned there to conduct research on economic policy for a regional think-think. Since the late 1980s, his interest has turned to the incipient Internet revolution. From 1994 to 1996 he developed Web projects at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) and co-founded a digital library initiative within the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. Since December 1996, he has been in Thailand as a John F. Kennedy Foundation Scholar for Information Science as Professor of Information Management at the Asian Institute of Technology. In 1997, he had a joint appointment as a researcher at the National Science and Technology Development Agency. He serves on numerous digital library committees and working groups in Europe, USA, and Asia, and has actively participated in the definition and promotion of the Dublin Core as a new international metadata standard for resource discovery.