A. Implementation aspects compared to generic Dublin Core
Suggestions and comments were received from all partners of the Agricultural Metadata Standards Initiative, as well as from Stuart Weibel, Executive Director of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. These led to the following implementation decisions with respect to the generic specification of Dublin Core:
Merged the DC elements Creator, Contributor and Publisher to one main element called Creator;
Dropped the element Source, but elaborated the element Relation to include information about the source;
Proposed a new element called TARGET AUDIENCE;
Proposed new qualifiers and attributes that are vital to the description and discovery of information in the agricultural domain.
Proposed creation of Authority files for elements and qualifiers that have secondary information that is not included in the metadata description of a resource but is relevant for resource discovery.
The proposed metadata set for describing information resources in the domain of agriculture contain 13 elements, namely, Creator, Title, Rights, Identifier, Relation, Description, Subject, Coverage, Date, Type, Format, Target Audience.
B. Future developments
As mentioned earlier, this paper only represents the first step in the development of tools to aid resource discovery in the agricultural domain. The initiative will be posted and advertised in agricultural forums so as to impact the targeted audience. Work is still in progress and the logical frameworks that have been developed are in the process of being converted into technical frameworks. The proposal will also be presented to the intergovernmental process of FAO for possible endorsement by member countries.
Some of the immediate future developments are as follows:
To encode and publish the Application Profile both as an XML Document Type Definition as well as an RDF Schema;
To initiate a pilot project between FAO and a number of important and successful agricultural gateway services. The project aims to provide a single access point with multi-host searching using the Agricultural Application Profile as the standard for linking common metadata across the different gateway services;
To develop software tools in support of the proposed standard (e.g. for import, export, validation, query purposes, etc.);
To register the metadata framework and specific application profile with authoritative metadata registries.
To develop guidelines for the application profile to assist implementers and users.
To monitor the impact of the proposed metadata application profile for agricultural resources, making any changes or enhancements based on the results of the impact study, and undertaking outreach work to promote and facilitate the rational and widespread use of metadata
References
1. Dublin Core Qualifiers. http://www.dublincore.org/documents/2000/07/11/dcmes-qualifiers/
2. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1, Reference description. http://www.dublincore.org/documents/1999/07/02/dces/
3. DMCI Type vocabulary. http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-type-vocabulary/
4. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Cataloguing and Indexing Manual.
5. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
6. Metadata: standards for Retrieving WWW Documents (and Other Digitized and Non-Digitized Resources). http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/lisa3/ruschfejad.html
7. Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Thesis and Dissertations- Version.03. http://ndltd.org/standards/metadata/current.html
8. Using Dublin Core. http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/04/12/usageguide/
9. Discovering Online Resources across the Humanities: A Practical Implementation of the Dublin Core. http://ahds.ac.uk/public/metadata/discovery.html
10. Dublin Core Metadata and the Cataloguing Rules. American Library Association, Committee on Cataloguing: Task Force on Metadata and the Cataloguing Rules (Final Report). http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/tf-tei5.html.
11. The open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework. http://www.openarchives.org/documents/oai.pdf
