Development of a Multilingual Metadata Registry for Dublin Core

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In the Internet environment, there are a number of communities which defines metadata schema based on their community-specific requirements. On the other hand, metadata interoperability is a crucial issue in the Internet and for digital libraries. Metadata schema registry, which provides authoritative information of metadata schemas, is widely recognized as an important function to share metadata schemaIn this research, we investigated metadata schema registry and constructed a prototype of a metadata schema registry which provides schema information of Dublin Core expressed in multiple languages. The registry stores and provides a metadata vocabulary which contains terms to define resource properties and those to define classes (or types) of metadata values. In this research, we collaborated with researchers in Europe and USA who have been involved in Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.The registry stores metadata schemas expressed in Resource Description Framework (RDF) schema language. As of March 2003, the registry has a set of reference descriptions of 15 Simple Dublin Core elements in English and translations in 22 languages, Dublin Core qualifiers in English and Japanese. In addition to the development of the registry, through this research, we obtained a software mode to support development of software tools for metadata, e.g., metadata editors and retrieval tools, from a metadata schema and a framework to support metadata harvesting across multiple metadata schemas. We have presented papers on the registry and related works at international conferences.