Preliminary Programme for DC-2007 announced

DCMI has announced the publication of the preliminary programme for the DC-2007 conference, which this year is to be held in Singapore at the end of August. Both Andy and I were/are members of the Programme Committee.

The "theme" for the conference is "Application Profiles: Theory and Practice", and although my recent experience of DC conferences has been that in reality the theme is at best somewhat loosely adhered to, this year I think there will be some interesting contributions around this specific area. I'm particularly looking forward to hearing from Mikael Nilsson about his work on a model for a Description Set Profile and seeing how that is received by the conference audience. From looking at the programme, I think that is set to be the main subject of discussion in the two sessions related to the DCMI Architecture Forum on the afternoon of the first day of the conference.

As I argued a while ago, the absence of a formal specification of what constituted a DC metadata application profile has been slightly problematic because it has left the way open to a range of (sometimes incompatible) interpretations of that notion. This current work, it seems to me, will be a significant step towards putting in place a key "missing piece" of the jigsaw centred on the DCMI Abstract Model - and I'd hope that it will result in a very useful specification for DC implementers.