Tomaž Erjavec: (Keynote) Metadata as a Strategy of domain-specific Content Modelling

Intelligent storage and management of digital resources have become a key issue in all scientific disciplines. Concurrently, the term “metadata” itself has evolved beyond the context of library science to describing general aspects of content modelling and semantisation of digital objects.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines are a formal specification and accompanying documentation defining a vocabulary of XML elements, meant for the annotation of texts for scholarly purposes. TEI is widely used for the encoding of texts in digital libraries, esp. those with complex annotations. A required part of every TEI-conformant document is its meta-data, i.e. the teiHeader element, with a rich and detailed structure.

The talk illustrates our use of TEI, esp. the TEI header in the modelling of varied text types: digital manuscript editions, dictionaries and language corpora. The use of XML and TEI makes for a flexible and well-documented modelling framework, which can be easily integrated into Web based applications, with free text or complex metadata searches.

 

Thomas Burch & Andrea Rapp: Infrastructures for Digital Edition

The infrastructural projects introduced in this talk pursue different goals and methods, but can profit from one another to provide their users with optimal solutions.

The virtual research platform FuD, developed for the collaborative research centre 600 “Foreigness and Poverty”, facilitates the cooperation of projects from diverse humanistic and social science disciplines by providing a framework for work-, publication- and information processes based on the specific needs of its users.

The virtual research environment TextGrid is baded on Grid-Technology and develops central, generic services and tools for various humanistic and cultural science communities. The modular structure of both systems and their consideration for existing standards and interfaces allows for an exchange of data and the common development of certain services.

 

Walter Koch: Modelling and Implementation of webservice-based Vocabularies

The use of controlled vocabularies is a standard approach within documentation and information activities. Since the adventure of computers usage of printed material has been complemented by computerized access especially via the Internet. Global and immediate access to the Web have caused new means of use and integration of computerized and digitized vocabularies.

Based on the structural elements outlined in ANSI Z39.19 or related ISO standards the author together with AIT – Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH has developed a SOAP/WSDL based WebService which supports different structures as lists, taxonomies or thesauri. This service supports the retrieval of topics or concepts (identified by a term) using metadata connected with them using boolean logic which also supports facetted searches. As the result of such a service not only metadata related to a term is available, but the semantic structure in which a concept is embedded will be returned, too.

In the presentation examples will be given how authority files or thesauri have been implemented, among them TGN - the Thesaurus of Geographic Names (integrated in museum collection management systems) - or the IconClass classification system. Other aspects include the use of vocabularies in multilingual applications (demonstrated by projects of Europeana, the European Digital Library), visualization of semantic networks based on XTM-TopicMaps and the access to vocabulary WebServices in a  modern Cloud Storage and Computing environment.

 

Monika Hagedorn-Saupe: Metadata Harvesting in the European context

In the field of cultural heritage there is a wide range of databases in use to document the books, museum objects, maps, films a.s.o. In order to make information on cultural heritage available throughout Europe and to allow easy access for scientists as well as the general public, a joint initiative on a European level has been put into place: the portal www.europeana.eu.

Experts from the fields of libraries, museums, archives and media archives are working together in several European projects to build up Europeana. Currently, a beta-version of the portal is online - already comprising about five million objects. The metadata-format currently used is a basic one: ESE (an extended Dublin Core), based on a more librarian approach. In the museum field working groups in the US, CDWA-lite has been developed, mainly for art museums. In Germany a working group has developed the harvesting museumdat, which is based on CDWAlite, but extended in order to serve also other type of museum collections. Within the ATHENA project, which aims especially to support museums in delivering their data to Europeana, the museumdat standard has been crosschecked and further enriched by the UK standard SPECTRUM.

By applying those standards it is much easier for museums to provide their data not only to Europeana, but also to national, regional and also thematic portals, thus allowing to link knowledge much more than was possible in the past.