Metadata Workshop, Luxembourg - 1-2 December 1997

Workshop Report - 1. Objectives and context

This document is the report of the first Workshop on Metadata, held in Luxembourg on 1 and 2 December 1997.

DGXIII/E4, the Electronic publishing and libraries unit, is organising a series of workshops on the issue of metadata. Intended participation is from libraries sector projects within the Telematics Applications Programme and from projects in other TAP sectors and other programmes, both EU and national.

Objective: to establish a platform for co-ordination between projects concerned with metadata in a broad sense.

Under the current Framework Programme for RTD there are a number of projects concerned with metadata as such or with descriptions and descriptors of electronic documents. These projects will come across the same issues and problems and will benefit from concertation, as this will allow them to compare their concepts and approaches with others.

Objective: to make a wider European community aware of developments in the standards arena and stimulate feedback from the projects to the standards.

Developments in metadata in the Internet, specifically in Dublin Core, are moving fast. Some European organisations invest in participating in the Dublin Core workshops but not all have easy access to this activity. By inviting Dublin Core workshop participants to present the developments in the proposed workshops, a wider European audience can be informed on this subject. At the same time, models and experiences from the projects can be fed back into the standards arena.

The intended practical result of the workshop was the identification of key issues to be addressed and discussed on an on-going basis, thereby giving the projects a handrail in their research and specification phase.

This first workshop of 1½ days contained a tutorial, project presentations, breakout sessions discussing various aspects and resulted in conclusions and recommendations for further work as presented in sections 9 and 10 of this report. The programme is appended as Appendix 1. The participants list is given in Appendix 2.

A second workshop of one day, scheduled for mid-1998, will contain an update from the standards and reports from projects leading into discussion on solution scenarios.

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