Schemas and Ontologies: Building a Semantic Infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries Speakers Abstract & Bio

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Pete Johnston works in the Interoperability Focus at UKOLN and is concerned primarily with the exchange and reuse of information in the fields of Government, Education and Cultural Heritage. He has collaborated with the UK Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability (CETIS) and has been involved in the development of a metadata schema registry for the UK Metadata for Education Group (MEG). Within the CORES project, Pete has focused primarily on data modelling and the expression of application profiles in RDF. Pete has detailed expertise in XML and RDF and has co-authored DCMI recommendations on expressing Dublin Core in XML. Prior to joining UKOLN, Pete worked on a digital records management project based at Glasgow University Archive Services where he gained experience in various areas of markup technologies.

Rachel Heery works for UKOLN as Assistant Director leading the Research and Development team. Rachel has undertaken research over recent years in the field of metadata, resource discovery and information architectures. She brings to this role wide experience of the implementation and development of information management systems in the commercial and library sectors. She has a particular interest in schema registries and application profiles which have been central to the SCHEMAS, CORES and MEG registry projects. Rachel has been active in the development of the Dublin Core, and has published in the area of metadata management and given presentations at a number of international workshops and meetings. She co-chairs the DCMI Registry Working Group, and is a member of the Dublin Core Advisory Board.

Publishing and Sharing Schemas Overview & Case study - MEG registry tool

As the number and range of Web based services increase there is a need to ensure that processes for managing metadata schemas are effective. Both human users and software agents need to find out about schemas in use and about implementer extensions and variations to "standard" schemas. These requirements are being met through the development of metadata schema registries. A schema registry is an application that allows the managers and owners of metadata schemas to publish their schemas, describing both 'standard element sets' and 'customised application profiles' providing interfaces for the navigation and exploration of those schemas. A managed schema registry becomes an authoritative source for information about metadata schemas, and provides an access point to those schemas for re-use.

This presentation will examine the role of registries, particularly in the context of digital libraries, and consider their potential as a shared service. It will consider possible connections with requirements within the eScience and GRID communities.

This presentation will be followed by a brief demonstration of the prototype registry that is being developed to support the UK's Metadata for Education Group (MEG). MEG provides a forum for discussing the provision of educational resources across the UK, and seeks to encourage consistency of approaches to the description of such resources. The registry is a Web application built on the Redland RDF toolkit and it is complemented by a Java authoring tool for the creation and editing of schemas.