4 articles: state of the art, standards, harmonization and (research data) reuse issues

Catching up with some long-overdue reading and have found 4 articles of particular interest for their informative descriptions of some current issues in metadata.

State of the Art and Future Directions

An April 2008 JISC document about Metadata for digital libraries by Richard Gartner

Standards

Anyone who is a regular Ariadne reader will already know about an updating on what is happening in the various standards worlds:

Sarah Currier’s overview of current initiatives in standards for educational metadata:

Metadata for Learning Resources: An Update on Standards Activity for 2008

From the article:

This article does not aim to be a critical look at such initiatives; it simply aims to give readers with an interest in educational metadata a snapshot of the current landscape, both for easy reference, and to encourage wider participation in these standards activities. The major areas of development covered in this article are:

1. LOM Next: plans for the next version of the IEEE LOM.
2. The Joint DCMI/IEEE LTSC (Learning Technology Standards Committee) Taskforce: bringing together the two major metadata standards used for learning resources, and providing an RDF translation for the LOM.
3. DC-Education Application Profile (DC-Ed AP): a modular application profile purely looking at educational aspects of resources, based on community requirements.
4. The United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee Learning Materials Application Profile (JISC LMAP) scoping study : working alongside a number of similar projects looking at application profiles for repositories in other areas, e.g. images.
5. International Standards Organisation Metadata for Learning Resources (ISO MLR): based primarily in Canada, this international standards body is devising a new international standard for educational metadata, in response to perceived limitations of the IEEE LOM.
6. The European Commission’s PROLEARN Harmonisation of Metadata project: a study into the issues and challenges of achieving harmonisation in metadata, given the heterogeneous landscape

Harmonization (including metadata reuse issues across different abstract models)

The second is Harmonization of Metadata Standards (January 21, 2008 ) edited by Mikael Nilsson:

Contents:

1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE NOTION OF METADATA
3. METADATA STANDARDS
4. HARMONIZATION
4.1 Abstract Model standards
4.2 Vocabulary standards
4.2.1 Element vocabularies
4.2.2 Value vocabularies
4.3 Syntax standards
4.4 Application profiles
5. CHALLENGES FOR HARMONIZATION
5.1 Application Profiles in DC and LOM
5.2 Identifying and reusing elements
5.3 Requirements for application profiles
5.4 Summary of obstacles
6. ADDRESSING THE HARMONIZATION ISSUES

Reuse of database/resources for research

Another looking at resource reuse issues in research and database repositories is a chapter titled Ontology Reuse Metadata Model from a 2007 digital dissertation by Elena Pâslaru-Bontaş, A Contextual Approach to Ontology Reuse.

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