Weibel Lines

It's the Model, Stupid

A short history of data modeling in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and what it means for the future of cataloging

The cardinal rule at the first Dublin Core meeting way-back-when was Thou Shalt Not Conflate Syntax and Semantics. A rule honored more in the breech than in observance perhaps, but it emphasizes the importance of separating these two fundamental facets of communicating structured information. We were right about this… almost. The missing part of the picture was a sound underlying data model. 

We knew what we were trying to say, we thought we knew how to say it. How hard is it to describe the basic characteristics of a resource, after all? Title of resource is…. Creator of resource is…. We even spoke about the initiative in terms of grammars and evolving pidgin languages (simple, emergent grammars). We hobbled along with only a vague common understanding – a model implicit in the aggregate projects using Dublin Core, propagated through imitation, nowhere formally specified.

It isn't though we didn't try.  Early attempts to arrive at a formal data model were fraught with contention and even acrimony. Difficult meetings (Washington… Dublin… Crete), leading to small beachheads that, lacking broad consensus, soon washed away. Maybe it wasn’t so important? After all, people still used DC, we continued to attract adherents. DC was spreading… 25 languages, 50 countries. And AACR2-MARC, arguably the world’s most successful resource description standard, didn’t have a data model either… how bad a problem can it be?

But the chickens come home to roost. The lack of a formal model led to a plethora of non-interoperable systems, crippling one of the foundation principles of the Initiative. It took 10 years for DCMI to finally evolve and adopt a formal model, and one might wonder whether simple exhaustion was a factor in its ultimate acceptance. It will be a long time before this model channels practice sufficiently to bring the many flavors of DC closer to the goal of sharing metadata across systems, let alone across various other metadata frameworks.

The Dublin Core Abstract Model, led by Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, and later attracting the efforts of Mikael Nilsson in the cause of bridging the DCMI framework with that of IEEE LOM, is a hybrid distillation of ideas gleaned from library practice and the Semantic Web’s cornerstone technology, RDF. It reflects insights of emerging Web practice (the use of URI’s as persistent identifiers, for example), and embraces lessons learned from a decade of early metadata adopters.

Yesterday afternoon at DC-2006, Diane Hillmann presented a summary of progress (and… surprise… contention) associated with the RDA effort, what most people understand as the international revision of AACR2. From my own uninformed perspective, it appears that this effort suffers from much the same problem that we have had in the Dublin Core – a data model implicit in years of practice and rule-revision on top of rule-revision, resulting in a focus on the minutia of rules rather than being guided by formal principles of description.

The Web has forced us all out of isolated communities of practice and into the Internet Commons. Certainly the practice and topography of librarianship is changing out from under us. As we struggle under the stress of these changes, it is perhaps predictable that legacy systems such as cataloging practice will change even more slowly. The RDA effort recognizes the importance of updating our profession to fit more comfortably into the Internet Commons. If we are to achieve anything like the interoperability we hope for, we will need common structural models. If the effort devolves to simply unraveling existing rules and rewinding the yarns, we will fall short of the integration we need to support our future. The successes and failures of the DC community in its own modeling struggles can be useful… and reusable.  I gather that the Joint Steering Committee has sought consultation with representatives of the IEEE LOM metadata community as well as with DCMI. It would be fitting if the DCMI could return some value to the community that has provided so much of the insight that has motivated its own progress.

Mikael Nilsson’s exhortation is on the mark. Less talk about metadata sets, and more talk about models. It is both difficult and important to get this piece right.

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Image: DC-2006 welcome reception

Push, Pull, and Self-censorship

Librarianship has for some time been immersed in a conversation about relevance. What value do libraries embody in the age of the Amazoogles, cell phones with computational power rivaling early space vehicles, and home computers with a couple terabytes of storage? 

Libraries have traditionally been a pull technology… you have to go to a physical place, find the item you want (generally known beforehand), and pull it off the shelf.

Increasingly we live in a push information world. TV pushes their take on the news at us, RSS feeds push the headline news and what has changed on the Internet… for places we’ve pre-selected, at least. 

The following, from the DemocracyNow.org website, is a chilling commentary on what the corporate news industry is pushing to the American public:

TV Networks Focus on JonBenet Ramsey Case Over NSA Ruling
The major court ruling on the National Security Agency surveillance program has received scant coverage from the nation’s three major networks. On Thursday, ABC, CBS and NBC all led their nightly broadcasts with the latest in the 1996 murder case of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. ABC devoted twice as much time in its broadcast to Ramsey as it did to the NSA story. CBS offered seven times as much airtime to Ramsey as it did to the NSA story. And NBC devoted 15 times more airtime to Ramsey.

It is hard to know whether this is self-censorship on the part of Big-News, or simply venal sensationalism (or both), but it is discouraging, and accentuates the importance of independent sources of information in the future of democracy. 

I’m not sure how libraries can effectively compete for the attention of television viewers, but as traditional sources of news become ever more co-opted by the infotainment industry, the role of providing a neutral spectrum of information is increasingly important.  System vendors are making it easier for libraries to set up RSS feeds to alert patrons to newly acquired assets and community events, and many libraries use them.  And Worldcat.org now provides web-access to records for 1.3 billion items in 10,000 libraries free of charge. It ain’t book-TV, but libraries at least have a beachhead where other sectors of the information industry have ceased to take their patrons seriously. The service model is changing (the role of disclosure becomes paramount: see Lorcan's notes on the Search, Share, and Subscribe, for example), but the mission is still pretty much the same, and needed more than ever.

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Image: Lake Union houseboat, Seattle

Not the end of an era

Those of us with gray hair are fond of reminiscing about the cost of our first computers or how much memory we thought was impossibly more than we could ever use. I recall during my first months at OCLC that the Office of Research acquired its first 1 gigabyte disk pack… an expensive device about the size of a small refrigerator. Lots of cameras have more now, and it would be a rare automobile that does not eclipse the computing resources of the space shuttle. Now-quaint marvels such as these afford benchmarks that measure our progress along the digital byways.

It is harder to identify with data standards such as the MARC record in the same way, especially in an age of global indexing and microformats (there may be a few of us who can remember their first 245 field, but these don’t have the same oomph in the retelling as, say, a 5 megabyte hard drive or IBM software on a cassette tape).

The recent passing of Henriette Avram is an occasion for reflection on the importance of structured data to our community. Henriette, as architect of one of the world’s most important data standards, led a transformation of the profession of librarianship that will outlast most of us.  A large part of  every dollar I've earned in two decades comes from the industry she helped to spawn.

Jim Gray, a Turing award winner and noted researcher for Microsoft, recently told me (on the day before Henriette’s death, as it turns out) his slides on the history of libraries in the digital age number four: they start with Alexander and the Alexandria library and the third is of Henriette and the MARC record.

Thank you, Henriette.
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Image: Park Avenue in New York City on a beautiful day in April, 2006

Post Script:  Walt Crawford, my-soon-to-be-more-closely-related colleague, caught me out in a goof, which I fixed, and if you didn't find it, tough.  Check the Internet Archive.  I'm not a real librarian... I admit it. But I'm married to one!  She's not a cataloger either. (thanks, Walt!)

Conference Report: Web Wise 2006

Traugott Koch has been for many years a touchstone of integrity for me.   I know that what he says to me is honest, direct, and unblemished by tact.  You might think this a backhanded compliment, but I say it with  high regard and affection.   Dependable, knowledgeable tellers-of-unvarnished-truth are rare indeed.

A few years ago, Traugott remarked to me how important it was for colleagues to meet at conferences and engage in the sort of intellectual discourse for which such events are intended, rather than flying in for a day, laying on a presentation, and dashing off to something else.  Of course, this was at a three day conference that I flew into, gave a presentation, and dashed away to something else.  I guess thats why I remember his remark so well.

Last month I fulfilled the 'summing-up' role at the WebWise 2006 conference in Los Angeles.  This may be the only role in conventioneering worse than 'after-dinner speaker'.  Your audience is tired of forth-holders, hungry, and inclined to trickle away mid-talk, roll-about carry-on bag rumbling astern.  Worse yet, you have to find the soft-and-creamy center of each session, risking lasting enmity from the neglected and the too-well-attended alike.  Besides... can't we all figure out for ourselves what we learned?

I fulfilled my duty as best I could, frantically editing remarks on that morning's talks while trying to follow the dense, policy-rich discourse of the penultimate session.  It turned out to be hard work, but also quite rewarding.  Actually paying close attention brought a sense of coherence to the event as a whole which I would have missed.  I'm not sure my effort added much to the conference, but it sure helped me get more out of the experience.  An extended version of my summary is available in the March, 2006 edition of DLib magazine.

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Seattle has a troll bridge... or troll-under-a-bridge, anyway.  Photo by the author, January, 2006