More on DC/RDA data model meeting
Here are some more links to discussion about the Dublin Core/Resource Description and Access meeting in London last week.
Andy Powell was there and posted about it in When Worlds Collide …, so go read that.
Jenn Riley knows a lot about metadata, and she has some reservations about the new project. In DC and RDA – The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? she says:
There’s nothing in the announcement that indicates the development of RDA proper will be affected by this work; in fact, the indication in the announcement that funding will be sought for the activities outlined implies the work is a long way off, likely entirely too late to have any real effect on RDA. This seems to be to be entirely backwards – trying to harmonize DC principles with RDA after the fact. Didn’t the DC community learn its lesson about the pitfalls of this approach when developing the Abstract Model, only realizing long after developing a metadata element set that it would benefit from an underlying model.
This general approach failed miserably with the DC Libraries Application Profile. There, the application profile developers wanted to use some elements from MODS, but weren’t able to because MODS doesn’t conform to the DCMI Abstract Model. So basically what the DC community said here was that application profiles are great, they form the fundamental basis of DC extensibility, but, oh yeah, you can’t actually use elements from any other standards unless they conform to the Abstract Model, even though are no approved encodings for even DC itself more than two years after the Abstract Model was released. OK then. Way to foster collaboration between metadata communities.
Jonathan Rochkind says in RDA, JSC, DCAM, RDF, FRBR that he doesn’t grok the Dublin Core Abstract Model. He points to Towards an Interoperability Framework for Metadata Standards (1 MB PDF) by Mikael Nilsson, Pete Johnston, Ambjörn Naeve, and Andy Powell, and says it’s been helpful in helping him get a better idea of what it means. Follow the links in his blog post for other interesting stuff.
Lorcan Dempsey’s Data Convergence says the new plan is “interesting food for thought.”