DC-assist

Dublin Core Assistant

UKOLN

In light of the cessation of core funding for the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN after 31 July 2013 we are providing notification of the planned withdrawal of this service after 31 April 2013.

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

[Metadata] [UKOLN]

DC-assist was developed by Andy Powell, UKOLN, University of Bath.

UKOLN is funded by MLA: the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council,
the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further
Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC
and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the
University of Bath where it is based.