June 22, 2007 4:06 AM
Conference to address metadata issues
An annual metadata forum conference is scheduled for July 9-11, 2007 in New York. The issues to be addressed are:
Data Interoperability - This will address the issue of data interoperability between different service providers. The conference agenda identifies two requirements for data interoperability: data description and data context.
Data Standards - The conference will address the issue of requirement for standards that will assist in metadata definition for interoperability.
Data Registry - How to find the metadata that can be used? The suggested methods in the agenda are search engine and registries.
Terminology - The conference agenda is to discuss the language used for describing subject, properties and terms for these; the connection of this language with the data (object) that is collected and stored.
To summarize: data is required for interoperability, standards are required to define data for interoperability, some mechanism is required to find this metadata and finally metadata terms must be found.
What we have discussed?
We have discussed requirement for normative metadata, method to find metadata and procedure to use metadata. The summary is: normative metadata is required for interoperability between different applications, context mediator will translate and convert metadata according to the web service description and the functional description associated with the participating web services. In order to enable interoperability the metadata of web service provider must be understood by the web service requester. This requires awareness about the metadata definitions.
We have discussed the requirement for normative metadata, now the question is how to represent the normative metadata? This question will be addressed in this conference. Thus thesaurus based context mediator may translate the synonyms to the same metadata representation.
| Example: charge, price, cost, money, etc. may map to same metadata element in one context; metadata element may be represented as xxyyzz. |
- ISO 639 - This is a standard that defines alphanumeric codes for languages.
- ISO 3166 - This standard describes the country codes.
- ISO/IEC 11179 - These standards describe the methods and principles for data element definition, classification, naming and registration. A conceptual model for metadata registry is also described.
- IETF BCP 47 - These specifications define procedures to be used for language tags.
I will continue discussion on how this metadata representation will effect semantic web services development.
I am going to be blogging live from a couple of days of the 
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