Presenter:

-------Jane Hunter---------

Information from the proposer:

Dr Jane Hunter
Senior Research Scientist,
Distributed Systems Technology CRC (DSTC), Brisbane
http://archive.dstc.edu.au/RDU/staff/jane-hunter.html

jane@dstc.edu.au

Harmony Project Collaborators:

• Carl Lagoze, Cornell University
• Dan Brickley, ILRT
• Libby Miller, ILRT

Applying an Event-aware Model to Museum Metadata

In this session I'll briefly describe a collaboration between the Harmony Project and CIMI (Consortium for Interchange of Museum Information) which is investigating the application of the ABC event-aware metadata model to enhance interoperability between metadata descriptions from different museums.

The Harmony International Digital Library project has been investigating models and tools to facilitate machine-understandable communication between different metadata domains (Dublin Core, MPEG-7, IFLA, CIDOC CRM, INDECS). The collaborators have developed a common event-aware metadata model and metadata vocabulary which will hopefully provide a stable underlying infrastructure for clearly describing the individual resources, events, contributions and relationships which typically constitute a collection of digital multimedia resources. By applying the proposed model, we hope to generate consistent, well-structured,unambiguous and modular metadata descriptions which will lead to improved fine-grained resource discovery, easier mapping between different metadata schemes and the explicit tracking of intellectual property rights.

In collaboration with CIMI, we have acquired current metadata descriptions and images from the following four CIMI members:

• Australian Museums Online (AMOL) - Powerhouse Museum;
• National Museum of Denmark;
• Natural History Museum of London;
• The Research Libraries Group (RLG)/Library of Congress.

To test the ABC model, we've been:

1. mapping the museum-specific metadata descriptions into the common ABC metadata model;
2. expressing the remodelled descriptions in RDF;
3. loading the results into SQUISH (an RDF Query Engine developed at ILRT) and
4. performing queries across the metadata to retrieve images from different museums.

Further information on this collaboration is available from: http://www.metadata.net/harmony/Collaboration.htm

This work has raised a number of difficult problems and open questions including:

• Is it actually possible to allow extensibility of metadata standards to satisfy domain-specific requirements without compromising interoperability?
• Are automated machine mappings between metadata descriptions or standards from different domains an impossible dream?
• Is there a single underlying data model capable of supporting the metadata requirements of multiple domains without lossiness or misinterpretation?

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