Sir/Madam,
You have elaborated on the subject of metadata in detail, however you have not mentioned
its applications. The value of providing metadata lies in its use by service providers.
Interoperability among archives that expose metadata then becomes a key factor. Protocols
OAI-PMH and Z39.50 provide this interoperability. This would have a given a complete
context to your article
Rohit Kelapure (rkelapur@vt.edu)
Mon, 27 Jan 2003 16:55:23 GMT
Rohit,
Many thanks for your message, which has been passed on to me as an author of
the article you commented upon.
I couldn't agree more, however the article is pretty old now, and much of the service end of metadata utilisation has only really come together in the years since the article was written.
OAI-PMH, for example, wasn't around, and the ideas behind it were only beginning to coalesce in bar-room discussions here and there. Z39.50, although well established in libraries, (US) Government information and parts of the environmental sector was still not really seen as a fully fledged means of delivering meaningful metadata functionality to users. Indeed, the Archaeology Data Service (about which the article was written) was one of the places pushing hard for that sort of view on Z39.50, and ideas developed there led to now well understood concepts such as the use of Dublin Core for cross-domain searches in Z39.50, as enshrined in the Bath Profile.
We now have many of the metadata standards (DC, METS, etc), and a good range of protocols for sharing and searching them (OAI-PMH, Z39.50, etc). The remaining problems are just as great, with issues still to resolve around encouraging/mandating/enabling the population of metadata elements with useful and meaningful content; in many ways, that'll take longer to crack than the issues we've managed to solve. The whole Web Services environment also poses some interesting questions, when it comes to embedding the metadata we have - and the services for storing, disclosing and discovering it - within portals and the like in a meaningful, interoperable, and extensible fashion. There's plenty still to do!
Paul Miller (P.Miller@hull.ac.uk)
Tue, 28 Jan 2003 21:10:19 +0000