Standards for collections and information retrieval portals metadata drafted
The NISO (National Information Standards organisation) Meta Search Initiative has published two draft standards for Collections and Service Description metadata. As the first international affiliate of NISO Helsinki University Library has been active in the compilation of both these standards.
The draft standard NISO Z39.91-200x, Collection Description Specification defines a means of describing collections, where a collection is defined as an aggregation of items. It takes the form of a Dublin Core Application Profile, a specification of how metadata terms from the Dublin Core metadata vocabularies and from other metadata vocabularies, some constructed for use in association with this Dublin Core application profile, are used to construct a description of a collection, in accordance with the DCMI Abstract Model. It also specifies an XML binding for serializing such descriptions for interchange between applications.
In particular the standard seeks to support:
- the discovery of collections of potential interest using some common access points,
- the identification of a known collection,
- the selection of one or more collections from amongst a number of discovered collections, and
- the identification of the services that provide access to the collection.
The standard NISO Z39.92-200x, Information Retrieval Service Description Specification defines a method of describing Information Retrieval oriented electronic services, including but not limited to those services made available via the Z39.50, SRU/SRW, and OAI protocols. The ZeeRex standard addresses the need for machine readable descriptions of services in order to enable automatic discovery of and interaction with previously unknown systems. It specifies an abstract model for service description and a binding to XML for interchange.
Unlike the World Wide Web, in which hyperlinks provide a means for discovery of other services, information retrieval protocols must either build the links into the protocol or have a database with a well known name of links to other services. The centralization of links to services in a registry has been undertaken by various organizations in the past, but these have been done on an ad-hoc basis using internal databases for their descriptions, and hence lack any significant interoperability. This standard provides a single schema in which records may be exchanged and processed by client software, thus allowing for the development of standards based software agents that can be expected to work with other vendors¿ information retrieval systems.
Further information on the NISO website
