A Metadata Thesaurus: Report on the Knowledge Organization of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Conference Proceedings

2003 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Proceedings appear in both print and online form. In order to aid search and retrieval of this growing body of research a researchers at the University of Washington and Siderean Software have started a metadata thesaurus. This poster reports on those efforts.

The Notion of the “Concept Instance”: Problems in Modeling Concept Change in SKOS

The U.S. National Science Foundation metadata registry under development for the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is a repertory intended to manage both metadata schemes and schemas. The focus of this draft discussion paper is on the scheme side of the development work. In particular, the concern of the discussion paper is with issues around the creation of historical snapshots of concept changes and their encoding in SKOS. Through framing the problem as we see it, we hope to find an optimal solution to our need for a SKOS encoding of these snapshots. Since what we are seeking to model is concept change, it is necessary at the outset to make it clear that we are not talking about changes to a concept of such a nature that would require the declaration a new concept with its own URI.In the project, we avoid the use of the terms “version” and “versioning” with regard to changes in concepts and reserve their use to the significant changes of schemes as a whole. Significant changes triggering a new scheme version might include changes in scheme documentation that express a significant shift in the purpose, use or architecture of the scheme. We use the term “snapshot” to denote the state of a scheme at identifiable points in time. Thus, snapshots are identifiable views of a scheme that record the incremental changes that have occurred to concepts, relationships among concepts, and scheme documentation since the last snapshot. Aspects of concept change occur that we need to capture and make available both through the registry and through potentially in transmission of a scheme to other registries. We call these capturings “concept instances.”

Principles of knowledge organization: analysis and structures in the networked environment

Knowledge organization in the networked environment is guided by standards. Standards in knowledge organization are built on principles. For example, NISO Z39.19-1993 Guide to the Construction of Monolingual Thesauri (now undergoing revision) and NISO Z39.85- 2001 Dublin Core Metadata Element Set are two standards used in many implementations. Both of these standards were crafted with knowledge organization principles in mind. Therefore it is standards work guided by knowledge organization principles which can affect design of information services and technologies. This poster outlines five threads of thought that inform knowledge organization principles in the networked environment. An understanding of each of these five threads informs system evaluation. The evaluation of knowledge organization systems should be tightly linked to a rigorous understanding of the principles of construction. Thus some foundational evaluation questions grow from an understanding of stan dard s and pr inciples: on what pr inciples is this know ledge organization system built? How well does this implementation meet the ideal conceptualization of those principles? How does this tool compare to others built on the same principles?

SKOS and the Ontogenesis of Vocabularies

The paper suggests extensions to SKOS Core to make explicit where concepts in a knowledge organization system have changed from one version of the system to another.

Authenticity as a Social Contract—We Are Our Records

This poster presents the authors’ work to date on developing an application profile for authenticity metadata (the IPAM, or InterPARES Authenticity Metadata), including (1) the functional requirements,(2) metadata elements derived from the Chain of Preservation model from the InterPARES research project, (3) a crosswalk of a sample of IPAM elements to Dublin Core, PREMIS, and MoReq2010,(4) those elements deemed essential to presume the authenticity of a record as it moves from creation to permanent preservation, and (5) next steps, integrating the application profile into the Archivematica preservation system the core elements of the application profile relating to maintaining the presumption of authenticity through preservation and access.

Un-Editing Alfred: Rethinking Modern Editions of Pre-modern Texts from a Post-modern Sensibility

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06