Conference - Multiple Perspectives on Metadata

Vienna 12/13 November 2009

Johanna Puhl: The PLANETS-Ontology in the context of the PLANETS-Testbed and the XCL-Software Within the EC-funded project "Planets": "Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services", the subproject Testbed delivers a web-service containing different experiment-pathways in order to find the best services for long-term preservation of digital objects. Such services can be characterisation, migration and emulation. In a scenario, where a librarian/archivist tries to find the best tools and destination-formats for a certain file-collection in an automated procedure, an ontology that constitutes relations between different file-format properties as well as properties of metadata-formats is very desirable and can fundamentally support an evaluation of these tools. The XCL-Ontology is one part of the XCL-Software developed in cologne for the PLANETS-Subproject "Preservation Characterisation" and constitutes different experiment-tools in the Planets-Testbed. In this presentation the XCL-Ontology and it's overall-structure will be explained and it will be described how the Ontology fulfils the different needs of the user-community in the context of digital preservation and PLANETS. Context: Due to ongoing digitization processes, the topic of structuring and modelling content is increasingly being discussed and new approaches are being developed. Digital Asset Management Systems support users in analyzing, retrieving, processing, filing and citing structured information sources. From a technological perspective, XML-based systems are particularly well-suited for flexible and metadata-enriched methods of asset storage: The primary data content is augmented with additional descriptive elements by making use of modelling standards and markup languages. This facilitaties a multifaceted digital representation of knowledge as well as data interoperability. Unlike other platforms (e.g. Content- or Learning Management Systems), Digital Asset Management Systems place importance on the sustainability of digital assets as well as flexible long-term accessibility and controlled authorization. The conference will investigate multiple approaches to metadata strategies and discuss how these can support digital edition and preservation projects. On the one hand, metadata hold well-structured administrative, descriptive, technical and long-term preservation information about assets, while on the other hand, they present a domain specific semantic relevance that is embedded in the content of an asset. The conference will cover a range of topics including: • Ontology based metadata specifications • Markup language based edition strategies • Metadata Quality Assurance • Metadata and IPR • Metadata harvesting protocols & incorporation

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