Metadata Models - International Developments and Implementation

摘要

The questions thrown open by this article refer to certain related topics. Further developments from there thus promise to be fruitful for those questions. Schema issues for example will be touched by progresses in XML/RDF research, architecture issues will benefit from progresses on the field of de-central discovery systems such as Z39.50, LDAP or OAI. Architectural issues will influence at least the administrative metadata already mentioned. Research on formats will refer to presentation and storage format, which is important for migration and emulation of data. It may be expected, that additional metadata are needed to cover the aspect of format sufficiently. Business models, which concern metadata for rights, permission of use, payments and registrations are important as well. Trends and developments in this field should be observed carefully, as they might call for modifications in the respective metadata elements. Metadata are indispensable for the efficient search across multiple collections by supporting interoperability and crosswalks. A prerequisite for such services are reliable registries. Thorough application and use of metadata supports the documentation and maintenance of interrelationships within repositories. With descriptive and technical metadata for example, digitisation processes can be traced. For the dissemination of digitised contents, metadata are a major tool for resource discovery. They allow the documentation of multiple versions of digital objects, be it updated versions, different formats or translations. Metadata not only describe these versions but allow connections and links between the respective objects. Rights and reproduction information are stored safely in metadata. Ambitious applications in the Web such as the large-scale preservation of the Cultural Heritage or developments of the Semantic Web would be unthinkable without metadata.