Significant work has been done to develop international standards for mixed media resource discovery. In particular, an interdisciplinary, international consensus fostered by the library community (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative or DCMI) has developed the Dublin Core, now the core of many classification standards such as those for museums (see CIMI and AMOL), for education (see IMS/LOM, EdNA etc ) and for government (see AGLS). Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is due to release the Resource Description Framework, in which to express rich, structured descriptions to make them machine and human readable.
Australia is a lead nation in its adoption of the DC standard, particularly at government level and in research, university and the National libraries. DC-based subject gateways, such as MetaChem and AgriGate, were developed by libraries in the late 1990’s using ARC funds. These are traditional catalogues based on the DC standards, expressed in HTML, and accessible via the web.
Although it builds closely on previous work, this project stands alone. It seeks to re-conceptualise the cataloguing model by exploiting the potential of QDC and RDF. The underlying data models of QDC and RDF provide for relationships between metadata elements and between values. The ethnographic research technique of asking subjects to comment on already collected data, will be combined with resource classification, in a rich web of classification data. Authoring, annotating, linking existing and providing additional records will combine the benefits of classification and multi-perspective cultural interpretation.
Three participants, Liddy Nevile, Andrew Donald and Robert Donald, designed and built a catalogue system in advance of the release of the QDC and RDF standards, in a traditional cataloguing context. That experience led them to propose the Matchbox model. Their work is based on earlier support form by Drs Weibel and Miller, leaders of the DCMI and W3C Working Groups responsible for QDC and RDF.
Content for the data management system (metadata), will be authored and/or acquired in this project only to enable development and testing of the taxonomies, thesauri and research hypotheses.