On Monday this week I was at the kick-off meeting for a new piece of JISC-funded work to specify a Dublin Core Application Profile for images. This follows on from similar work on an application profile for scholarly works (SWAP) that I have been quite heavily involved in. Both pieces of work have been funded by JISC with a view to facilitating the exchange of richer, more consistent metadata between repositories and services, such as the Intute repository search project. In addition, work will be starting soon on an application profile for time-based media and geospatial data. What makes these three different from SWAP is that for each there already exist some pretty well-established metadata standards. For images, for example, there is the VRA Core and this might beg the question, do we really need another metadata profile? What makes this proposed application profile different from VRA is perhaps most significantly that VRA is heavily oriented towards art and cultural heritage images and the long standing services that deal with such images – such as the AHDS Visual Arts who are leading this piece of work. It hasn’t really been applied to images used across scientific and other disciplines and repositories will often have to deal with a mixture. Also, where institutional repositories are beginning to look at the SWAP model which has leveraged the multiple description possibilities of the Dublin Core Abstract Model, a new application profile that follows a similar structure and can describe multiple entities seems appropriate.
The meeting was very interesting and raised a *lot* of discussion points and questions, perhaps more than Polly and Mick from AHDS anticipated! What came through strongly is that it is essential that the requirements and use cases are fully explored before devising the application profile – draft documents were circulated before the meeting and were a good discussion-starter. It was also clear that for images subject is very very important, in fact, in many cases information about the image itself is very much a secondary entity – it is what the image is of that we are interested in. This means that when considering the entity-relationship model, there is an added layer of complexity. VRA deals well with this and there was some discussion about which, out of FRBR (as was used by SWAP) and VRA would prove a better model for basing this profile on. Thinking about this since, we only used some of the FRBR entities for our SWAP model and there are additional entities and relationships surround subject which might enable FRBR to describe image materials pretty well. It occurs to me that where another metadata record for the ’subject’ already exists, it might easily be referenced from a subject entity description, rather than capturing duplicate metadata from scratch. But that’s probably too much detail for now.
I haven’t had chance to digest all of the issues yet, but this work is very pertinent to me as the person responsible for setting up an image repository for the University of York and I anticipate the images application profile being of great use when I’m looking at our local metadata issues. Another this that is quite pleasing for me is that this piece of work takes repositories further into territory where arts subjects have specialist needs and, coming out of the AHDS, we can be sure that these will be fully considered. Where repositories are often seen as hosts for scientific papers and scientific data, it’s nice to see the arts well-represented.
I gave a little presentation about SWAP at the meeting (slides), following Pete Johnston, who has already beaten me to it with his post, who talked about the Dublin Core Abstract Model. Finding myself described by Pete as ‘ruthless’ was a little surprising, but the point being made at the time was very pertinent – figuring out what is out of scope is as important as tackling what is in.
