New DCMI Knowledge Management Community

A new Knowledge Management Community has been formed under the auspices of DCMI (the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative) to replace the old DCMI Global Corporate Circle. The aim is to apply a "more general focus on Knowledge Management" in place of the old community's charter which was restricted to the application of Dublin Core metadata in corporate environments.

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Ranganathan revisited: Facets for the future

ISKOUK held its second KOKO (KOnnecting KOmmunities) event from 14:00 - 20:00 on November 5th. 2007 entitled Ranganathan Revisited: Facets for the future . The intention was to explore the current status of faceted classification from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The event was sponsored by Factiva from Dow Jones and the venue was provided by the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS) at University College London UCL). Eighty-one people attended.

S. R. Ranganathan was the Indian librarian and academic who, in the 1930s, developed the theory of faceted classification. Faceted classification is an approach to presenting and organizing knowledge based on the identification of fundamental subject categories (‘facets') that allows the combination of relevant values from one or more facets to define a compound subject with great precision.

A report of the event is available for download from the ISKO UK web site. Copies of the presentations may be downloaded and MP3 recordings will also be available shortly.

Semantic Web Technologies

Back in mid-September, I drew your attention to a new online newsletter entitled Semantic Report. The second edition of this newsletter has just been published.

Please tell us, is this something we should be paying attention to and monitoring? If so, tell us why you think it's relevant to KO. If not, tell us why not.

Dublin Core Deficiency?

This ongoing dialogue on the DC-GENERAL mailing list might be of interest to some.

The plaintiff complains that there is no obvious element in DC which can indicate that a resource is a translation of another resource. Subsequent discussion occurs around possible usage of the isVersionOf / hasVersion refinements of element Relation. During that discussion, it is suggested that 'it may be helpful to look at FRBR'.

The plaintiff responds:

I can scarcely believe that it took the Scholarly Works Application Profile, in 2006, to define a "hasTranslation" property - and even now there's no isTranslationOf to reciprocate. In all these years has no-one needed a hasTranslation property, if hasVersion isn't appropriate?

Hmmm. Does DCMES really not cater for something so basic as translations?

What's your take on this?

Bob