Dublin Core Assistant

Introduction

DC-assist is a small, flexible help utility for metadata applications and is intended to complement the help pages embedded within existing software. Start DC-assist up once at the beginning of your session for quick and easy access to a set of help pages that provide:

• element and qualifier definitions,
• comments,
• data entry guidelines (not yet available),
• examples,
• links to further information.

DC-assist is written in Javascript. Although the initial download time can be quite long (up to 40 seconds over dial-up), once downloaded all the information is held locally within your Web-browser.

Javascript must be enabled for DC-assist to work.

Future work

DC-assist can be configured for local use using a configuration file. In the future, it will be enhanced so that as much information as possible will be extracted from an application profile stored in a metadata registry, directly from RDF schema definition files, or from some combination of both.

Application profiles

Three application profiles are currently supported:

DCMES version 1.1:

a simple Dublin Core configuration, providing information about the elements defined in Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description.

Qualified DC:

All the elements, element refinements and encoding schemes defined in DCMI Metadata Terms. This configuration also contains 130 examples (many taken from RFC-2731).

DC Education:

DC Qualified plus the additional elements and qualifiers recommended by the DC Education Working Group.

DC-assist configuration

Although primarily intended for use with Dublin Core applications, DC-assist is flexible enough to work with many metadata schemas.

DC-assist can be configured for a specific metadata tool by creating a configuration file that defines the set of elements, qualifiers, definitions and examples in use in that particular application. For example, if your application uses only 10 of the DC elements, 2 elements from another metadata schema and a limited number of qualifiers, you can easily tailor DC-assist for your needs.

Want to see a configuration for your application listed here? DC-assist can obtain its configuration from anywhere on the Web - more information about the format of DC-assist configuration files is available.

Maintained by UKOLN Systems Team
Last updated: 6-March-2005

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