DC-2006 Special session - ePrints Application Profile

At 2.00pm on Weds Oct 4th there is a DC-2006 special session about using Dublin Core to describe eprints (i.e. scientific or scholarly research texts, for example peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, working papers, theses, book chapters, reports, etc.).

This session will be largely based on some JISC-funded work that Julie Allinson (UKOLN, University of Bath) and I have been doing to develop a Dublin Core application profile for describing scholarly publications.

This work uses a combination of FRBR and the DCMI Abstract Model to create a description set for an eprint that is much richer than the traditional flat descriptions normally associated with Dublin Core.  The intention is to capture some of the relationships between works, expressions, manifestations, copies and agents.

"DC metadata tends to be thought of as only being capable of describing flat, single-entity, constructs - a Web page, a document, an image, etc. However, the DCMI Abstract Model introduces the notion of a description set, a group of related descriptions, which allows it to be used to capture metadata about more complex sets of entities, using models like the one described here.

DCMI is currently developing a revised set of encoding guidelines for XML and RDF/XML, which will allow these more complex, multi-description, description set constructs to be encoded and shared between software applications."

This session may therefore be of interest, not just to people working with eprints, but to those who want to see how the DCMI Abstract Model can be used to support rich resource description and how FRBR and DC can be used in combination.

This session will be part seminar, part discussion.  As well as sharing information about the work we have done so far, we also hope to have a discussion about forming a DCMI working group to take this work forward.  We will start with a presentation about the work:

• Background, rationale and fundtional requirements
• The model
• The application profile and vocabularies
• Dumb-down issues

The session will be led by Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation) and Julie Allinson (UKOLN, University of Bath).