The Metadata Set applied in the Registry of Jewish Resources in the Internet
Dov Winer and Sandra Siano-Weinreb sandraw@jazo.org.il eJewish.info – The Jewish Agency Inititative for Developing Jewish Networking Infrastructures http://www.ejewish.info The eJewish.info initiative of the Jewish Agency strives to achieve a shared Jewish market that may stimulate the provision and access to Jewish cultural heritage, education, goods and services. One of the first strands of this initiative is the Registry of Jewish Resources in the Internet. Its purpose is to tag the available collections of Jewish content I such manner that search engines, agents and the new Virtual Learning Environments that adopt the Learning Objects concept and technologies are better able to search and use them. Jewish Web sites owners and resources developers are invited to register their resources; an adequate system has been established for this purpose and it register Institutions, Collection maintainers and the resources themselves. A team of editors review the entries, filter them and complete their adequate indexing.
Partner registries: Institutions with expertise and interest in specific content areas have become partners of eJewish.info in setting special partner registries. The Dinur Center for Jewish History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem established one of the earliest including about 6,000 collections. A registry on Jewish Genealogy has also been established and others are planned for Theater, Community Services, Bio-Ethics, Zionism and more.
Thesauri and Controlled Vocabularies: A controlled vocabulary ensures that a subject will be described using the same preferred term each time it is indexed thus facilitating the retrieval of all information about a specific topic during the search process. A thesaurus was developed for indexing and retrieval of the resources entered in the eJewish.info registry.. The terms are linked to the resources indexed in the Registry and also to customized queries into Google. The thesaurus was translated and is maintained in addition to the English version into Hebrew, Russian, French and Spanish. One of the requirements for a partner registry is the development of an specific thesaurus.
Metadata Set: The Metadata set adopted for the Registry is that developed by the ETB IST project (European Treasury Browser http://etb.eun.org ). It adapted the Dublin Core for the purpose of indexing k12 educational resources. One specific feature is the inclusion of tag for the expression of the Quality Policy of the institution maintaining a specific Web collection. This enables a distributed quality control based on the self stated policy and the relative status of the institution implementing it.
Title DC.Title The name given to the resource usually by the Creator or Publisher Subject DC.Subject The topic of the resource. Typically, subject will be expressed as keywords or phrases that describe the subject or content of the resource. The use of controlled vocabularies and formal classification schemas is encouraged. The Thesaurus for Jewish Networking will be the controlled vocabulary for this element. Description DC.Description A textual description of the content of the resource, including abstracts in case of document-like objects or content descriptions in the case of visual resources. For visual resources see the guidelines of the Pictures Database from the Government Press Office (Who? Why? When? Where? What?) Publisher DC.Publisher The entity responsible for making the resource available in its present form, such as a publishing house, a university department or a corporate entity. Type DC.Type The category of the resource, such as home page, working paper, technical report, dictionary. TYPE should be selected from an enumerated lsit . See: http://www.agcrc.csiro.au/projects/3018CO/metadata/dc_tf/ Identifier DC.Identifier String or number used to uniquely identify the resources. URLs and URNs. Audience GEM.Audience Information from a controlled vocabulary that most closely identifies the specific audience of the resource bein described. http://www.geminfo.org/Workbench/Metadata/Vocab_Audience.html The Registry will provide an open entry for collecting additional categories so that eventually a ejewish.Audience list is defined Language DC.Language See DCMES Language(s) of the Metadata of the resources in the collectionintellectual content of the resource. Should coincide with RFC 3066 See: http://sunsite.dk/RFC/rfc/rfc3066.htm or rather ISO 639-2 Tags for identification of language Resource Language Renardus CLD The language of the content of the resources in the collection. ISO 639-2 Tags for identification of language Logotype Renardus CLD The URL of the logo (image) of the collection. Encoded as URL Quality selection policy ETB CLD The collection quality policy associated with the collection. (http://www.eun.org/etb/voc/cld_quality.doc) Country DC Qualifiers The country/state in which the collection is physically located. ISO 3166-1 Tags for the identification of country. See: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt Creator DC.Creator The person or organization primarily responsible for creating the intellectual content of the resource. For example, authors in the case of written documents, artists, photographers or illustrators in the case of visual resources. Question: applicable to collections? Date DC.Date The date the resource was made available in its present form. Recommended best practice is an 8 digit number in the form YYYY-MM-DD defined in http://www.w3c.org/TR/NOT-datetime , a profile of ISO8601.
