News

With more and more thesauri, classifications, and other knowledge organization systems being published as Linked Data using SKOS, the question arises how best to make them available on the web. While just publishing the Linked Data triples is possible using a number of RDF publishing tools, those tools are not very well suited for SKOS data, because they cannot support term-based searching and lookup. This free webinar presents Skosmos, an open source web-based SKOS vocabulary browser that uses a SPARQL endpoint as its back-end. It can be used by e.g. libraries and archives as a publishing platform for controlled vocabularies such as thesauri, lightweight ontologies, classifications and authority files. The Finnish national thesaurus and ontology service Finto, operated by the National Library of Finland, is built using Skosmos. Osma Suominen, National Library of Finland, will describe what kind of infrastructure is necessary for Skosmos and how to set it up for your own SKOS data. He will also present examples where Skosmos is being used around the world. The webinar is presented in partnership with AIMS: Agricultural Information Management Standards. For information on how to register for this free webinar, go to http://dublincore.org/resources/#2016skos2r (space limited).

In the past seven years, SKOS has become a widely recognized and used common interchange format for thesauri, classifications, and other types of vocabularies. This has opened a huge opportunity for the development of generic tools and methods that should apply to all vocabularies that can be expressed in SKOS. While expensive, proprietary or custom-developed solutions aimed at one particular thesaurus or classification have been dominant, now more and more open source tools are being created to deal with various aspects of vocabulary management. In this series of two webinars with Joachim Neubert (ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, Germany) and Osma Suominen (National Library of Finland), we start on 16 March 2016 with Webinar 1 by examining skos-history, a method and toolset to nail down changes in a vocabulary. We follow with Webinar 2 on 6 April 2016 focusing on Skosmos, a full-fledged web application for publishing SKOS vocabularies. The series is presented by DCMI in partnership with AIMS: Agricultural Information Management Standards. For more information on this webinar series and to register for each webinar, visit http://dublincore.org/resources/#2016neubert.

The submission deadline of 15 May 2016 for proposals to the Professional Program for DC-2016 in Copenhagen will be arriving before we know it. The professional Program includes panel sessions, tutorials and workshops. Panel sessions will be organized by experts in a specific area of metadata and provide a focused exchange of the latest research and/or best practice in the area. Panel sessions are customarily 1-1/2 hours in length. Tutorials on topics of current interest will be 1/2-to-1 day in length and can be addressed at an introductory, intermediate, or expert level. Tutorials are intended to impart knowledge or skills and address identified learning outcomes. Workshops, also 1/2-to-1 day in length, engage participants in active work to address one or more well-defined problems or issues. Most frequently, workshops include both participation in small- to medium-sized groups on either aspects of the subject matter to be addressed and the sharing of outcomes, conclusions drawn, and (sometimes) definition of future work. Proposals in all three Professional Program categories are 1-2 pages in length. For additional instructions for submission see the DC-2016 Call for Proposals page on the conference website at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2016/schedConf/cfp.

Many organizations have content dispersed across multiple independent repositories, often with a real lack of metadata consistency. The attention given to enterprise data is often not extended to unstructured content, widening the gap between the two worlds and making it near impossible to provide accurate business intelligence, good user experience, or even basic findability. How do you bring all those disparate efforts together to create content intelligence across the organization? This webinar will describe the benefits and challenges in developing metadata and taxonomy across multiple functional areas, creating a unified Enterprise Content Architecture (ECA). Hear Stephanie Lemieux, President and Primary Consultant at Dovecot Studio, talk about real enterprise metadata and taxonomy harmonization projects in different contexts, including a greeting card company, a media company, an automotive manufacturer and a consumer food manufacturer. See how they worked to harmonize across a number of diverse systems that supported multiple functions, from creative processes to manufacturing to reporting. For more information about the webinar and to register, go to http://dublincore.org/resources/#2016lemieux.

DCMI is pleased to announce that Valentine Charles, Europeana, and Lars G. Svensson, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, have agreed to serve as Co-Chairs of the DC-2016 Technical Program. In their capacity as Co-Chairs, Valentine and Lars with oversee the peer review processes for the conference. The DC-2016 Conference website is open at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/IntConf/dc-2016 and the Call for Participation has been published at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2016/schedConf/cfp.

The DC-2016 Call for Participation (CfP) has been published. DC-2016 will take place in Copenhagen and will be collocated with the ASIS Annual Meeting. The conference program will include a Technical Program of peer reviewed papers, project reports, and posters tracks. The Professional Program will include special sessions and panels, tutorials, workshops and best practice posters demonstrations tracks. The Conference Committee is seeking submissions in all tracks. The CfP is published at http://dcevents.dublincore.org/index.php/IntConf/dc-2016/schedConf/cfp.

Join Ruben Verborgh, researcher in semantic hypermedia at Ghent University, for a DCMI/ASIST joint webinar on the Linked Data Fragments family of technologies. The dream of Linked Data: if we just get our data online, the promised Semantic Web will eventually rise. Everybody will be able to query our data with minimal effort. We will be able to integrate data from multiple sources on the fly. Everything will just work and data will flow freely ever after. Well, that hasn't really happen yet. Even though we published billions of triples on the Web, there are few places that reliably let us execute queries over them. Integration is still very limited. This webinar introduces you to the Linked Data Fragments family of technologies, which take a much more pragmatic view of the Web of Data. Whereas one of the main problems with the Semantic Web is currently the high publication cost of data (with unknown return), Linked Data Fragments proposes shifting the complexity of querying from the server to the client. This makes publishing Linked Data affordable and realistic on the Web. For additional information about the webinar and to register, visit the DCMI Webinars homepage at http://dublincore.org/resources/#2015verborgh.

DCMI is pleased to announce that São Paulo State University (Universidade Estadual PaulistaUnesp) has joined DCMI as an Institutional Member. Unesp is one of the largest and most important Brazilian universities, with distinguished achievements in teaching, research and extension services. Unesp is supported by State funds and along with USP (Universidade de São Paulo) and Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) offers free public higher education in São Paulo State. Unesp was founded in 1976 and is the most successful model of a multicampus university in Brazil supporting intense and diversified activities in São Paulothe most developed State in Brazil. Unesp's influence is recognized through the level of regional development where its campuses are locatedone in the State capital and 23 others strategically distributed throughout the State. Unesp has appointed Flávia Bastos, Coordinator of Libraries, General Coordination at the São Paulo State University, as its representative to the DCMI Governing Board. For information on your organization joining DCMI, see the membership page at http://dublincore.org/support/.

Join independent consultant Richard Wallis, former Technology Evangelist for OCLC and currently working with Google on Schema.org, for this two part, in-depth webinar mini-series look at Schema.org titled "Schema.org in Two Parts: From Use to Extension". The webinar series examines the use of schema.org and its extension in the bibliographic and wider domains. Part 1 of the series titled "Fit For a Bibliographic Purpose" on 18 November 2015: (a) traces the history of the Schema.org vocabulary, plus its applicability to the bibliographic domain, and (b) the Schema Bib Extend W3C Community Group--why it was set up, how it approached the creation of bibliographic extension proposals, and how those proposals were shaped. The second more technical webinar in the series on 2 December 2015 explains the Schema.org extension mechanism for external and reviewed/hosted extensions, and their relationship to the core vocabulary. Wallis will take an in-depth look at, demonstrate, and share experiences in designing, and creating a potential extension to the Schema.org vocabulary. He will step through the process of creating the required vocabulary definition and examples files on a local system using a few simple tools, then sharing them on a publicly visible temporary cloud instance before proposing to the Schema.org group. For more information and to register for this free webinar, visit http://dublincore.org/resources/#2015wallis.

Joseph Tennis became Chair of the DCMI Governing Board and Paul Walk its Chair-Elect during the closing ceremony of DC-2015 in São Paulo, Brazil. Eric Childress became Immediate Past Chair and Michael Crandall retired from the Governing Board and his role as Immediate Past Chair. Tennis will be Chair of the Governing Board and its Executive Committee through DCMI's Annual Meeting and International Conference in Copenhagen in October 2016. Tennis is also the President of the International Society for Knowledge Management (ISKO) and is serving a four year term from 2014-2018. Information about the DCMI Governing Board and its members can be found at http://dublincore.org/about/oversight/.