[Metadata] Recruitment to the group

[Catherine Rey <crey@cnri.reston.va.us>]

Note:  This, along with several other messages, is being
forwarded to the list by the administrator, as Sally
encountered trouble with her original posting.

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-----Original Message-----
From: Sally Morris <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>
To: Metadata list <metadata@doi.com>
Date: 03 September 1998 12:30
Subject: Recruitment to the group

Albert and I are sending the following invitation to all the
appropriate groups we can think of ( you may have seen it on
the DOI discussion
list).   Obviously, by virtue of receiving this, you are
already a member, but we would be extremely grateful for
additional suggestions or,
better still, offers to communicate this invitation to other
groups which we may not already have thought of.
 
The Metadata Working Group - an invitation

For the past months, an international (mainly US/UK) group
has been working on the question of what metadata
('information about
information') is required in the digital environment to
support unique identifiers, such as the Digital Object
Identifier (DOI), and to make
possible the electronic identification, retrieval and
trading of intellectual property.

Our work has focused on two key areas: describing the
intellectual property (the 'object') itself, and describing
the various different rights
which users may have or may wish to acquire, and the terms
and conditions under
which these rights are available. Although the DOI itself
originated within the world of publishing, the issues raised
by identifiers and their
supporting metadata are common to all media, and we maintain
close links
with other industries, particularly music (which is well
advanced in this area). We have developed an underlying
model for metadata which we
are now trying to refine.

We are sponsored by EDItEUR, the UK based organisation that
has been active in creating Edifact EDI messages for the
publishing industry
world-wide. EDItEUR is currently engaged in a Title
Information Project that, when completed, will provide a
rich 'superset' of descriptive
metadata. We have also established relations with the Dublin
Core community and with the BIBLINK project, both of which
have developed
specific subsets of descriptive metadata. We plan to
continue this outreach to other groups, both inside and
outside the publishing world,
working with them to identify the most economical subsets
for specific purposes. We will also maintain close ties with
the National Information
Standards Organization (NISO) as it standardises various
metadata schemes.

On the rights metadata side, we are developing a detailed
classification of rights in the publishing context and are
taking an active part in an
international, European Union-funded research project to
compare descriptive and rights metadata structures from
different industries and
to develop a common basis for interoperability (INDECS). We
are also commencing a real-world pilot, with a number of
technology companies,
to test the practicalities of our rights classification. In
addition, we are actively supporting work on the 
dentification and classification of users. 
 
The underlying aim which runs through all these activities
is to ensure that the complete continuum of ways in which
users or organisations
with to interact with others' intellectual property - from
finding it to using it - can be carried out seamlessly,
conveniently and economically in
the digital environment. To achieve this requires the
development and adoption of common standards, so that
computer systems can be
completely interoperable.

You can find papers describing our work at
http://www.bic.org.uk/rights.html/, including most
importantly the minutes and papers of an
enormously valuable workshop of the Metadata Working Group,
held in New York on 18 and 19 June. One of the key
conclusions of this
workshop was that we needed more practical input from all
the players in the information chain, particularly
publishers and intermediaries
(secondary publishers and  librarians).

We would therefore like to extend a warm invitation to your
members to participate in our work. Discussions are carried
on mostly via an
e-mail listserv sponsored by the International DOI
Foundation, and to which you
can sign up via the DOI website (the June workshop was in
fact the first face-to-face meeting of the whole group); in
future we also plan an
occasional newsletter. Smaller teams are delegated to work
on specific
projects.

We should be very pleased to welcome more representatives of
the 'information value chain' to our group. Please contact
either of us if you are
interested.



Albert Simmons and Sally Morris (joint Chairs of the
Metadata Working Group)

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