Proposal:Dublin Core

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

This proposal is associated with the bolded strategic priorities below.

Achieve continued growth in readership.
Focus on quality content
Increase Participation.
Ensure that the underlying project infrastructure is secure, stable, and sufficient to guarantee the permanence of the projects and support ongoing growth.
Encourage Innovation.

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Summary

The projects should be able to expose metadata in the most basic and well recognised format, w:Dublin core (DC).

As each project has very different types of data to be described, the DC data should be entered into the wiki pages similar to the Persondata metadata. The mediawiki software then exposes this metadata.

Proposal

Contributors input the metadata:

{{Dublin Core
|TITLE        = 
|CREATOR      = 
|SUBJECT      = 
|DESCRIPTION  = 
|...
}}

An action like ?action=dublincore emits a DC record.

A specialpage lists all of the records.

This extends the existing functionality in mw:Manual:$wgEnableDublinCoreRdf (meta:RDF metadata) and mw:Extension:OAIRepository.

Motivation

Commons and Wikisource are digital repositories. They should expose structured metadata in a format which is understood by other systems.

On Wikimedia Commons, the Dublin Core record would describe the image. e.g. On commons:File:Portrait of Cornelis van Lill his son and the painter, Aert Schouman (1735).jpg, the {{Painting}} template would also emit the DC record. Wouldn't it be nice to have more information about an artwork? Apart from the basics like artist, title, year, I'd add categories like measure of painted surface, painting material, support, measure of support, point of origin, location, inventory or manuscript number, then the possiblity to link the artwork to literature and to categorize it iconographically like in ICONCLASS.

On Wikisource, the Dublin Core record would describe the original work.

On most other Wikimedia projects, if implemented, the Dublin Core record would describe the creative work of the page.

That would make Wikimedia an even more useful tool for information about an artist or the development of a topic in the history of art. Lists of works could easily be generated automatically and be linked to an article in Wikipedia.

At many departments of art history and research institutes all over the world, people are busy building and feeding art databases. I think Wikimedia has the infrastructure and the capacities to direct all these endeavours into one central and up-to-date database for art historians.

Key Questions

Potential Costs

References

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Dublin Core.

Want to work on this proposal?

.. --Aubrey 08:46, 29 October 2010 (UTC)