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About Common Terminology (CT)

About Common Terminology (CT)

 

Content

Purpose of CT

Common Terminology (CT) is to improve interoperability by allowing communities to use their own standards while providing uniformity to searching. It is to provide uniformity achieving and improving interoperability among cooperating national Well-Designed Digital Libraries (WDDLs) for International Open Public Digital Library (IOPDL). It is also to minimize loss of information and preserve the specificity and precision of the source metadata records. That is, it is to fulfill the technical requirement to establish IOPDL.

Moreover, CT is to solve Interoperability issues that pose a barrier to sharing and exchanging information among digital libraries and repositories. This is due to the use of diverse metadata standards, and their different degrees of generality or specificity. This causes loss of information at all metadata model levels (e.g., schema, schema definition language, record, and repository).

Overall

Common Terminology (CT) is developed to achieve interoperability among selected national Well-Designed Digital Libraries (WDDLs) all over the world for International Open Public Digital Library (IOPDL). CT is developed to improve interoperability among various metadata standards that have different generality and specificity levels. It ultimately allows communities to use their own standards while provides uniformity to searching. It proves high performance minimizing considerably loss of information and preserving the specificity and precision of the source metadata records.

CT project was started actively from May 2012 to achieve metadata interoperability among national Well-Designed Digital Libraries (WDDLs), which use diverse metadata standards and have very specialized quality and quantity collections in a subject area(s). It is to fulfill technical requirement to establish International Open Public Digital Library (IOPDL). IOPDL is an open digital library that makes the public all over the world be able to access any resources of cooperating national WDDLs, as a non-profit organization. More details for IOPDL is on iopdl.org.

CT project focuses on solving Interoperability issues due to the use of diverse metadata standards, and their different degrees of generality or specificity. These pose a big barrier to sharing and exchanging information among digital libraries and repositories. These cause loss of information at all metadata model levels (e.g., schema, schema definition language, record, and repository).

As a prototype, taking widely used standards (MARC, MODS, DC, and QDC) as bases, Common Terminology version 1.1 has been developed as a bridge terminology across different generality and specificity levels, by (Boaz) Sunyoung Jin, supervised by Professor Dubin and supported by Dean Smith of Graduate School of Library of Information Science in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during May 2012 – 2014. The detail works for the CT project can be found in the paper, ‘A Model and Roles of a Common Terminology to Improve Metadata interoperability‘ on http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50100.

Through empirical evaluations, Common Terminology proves as follows: it gives an assured solution to share information minimizing loss of information and preserving the specificity and precision of the source metadata records at multiple metadata model levels. It offers a certain way to improve interoperability allowing communities to use their choice of metadata standards but providing uniformity to search engines. CT also gives a solution to achieve interoperability among university libraries (e.g., Harvard, MIT, and UIUC) that use different standards, or among Well-Designed Digital Libraries (WDDLs) all around the world.

Definition, Roles and Benefits of CT

Common Terminology is defined as a set of Common Terms. A Common Term is property (element), or class. A property (sub-property) can be one kind of common element (field) or attribute (subfield) in two or more metadata schemas…. Please visit Definition webpage for more details.

Developing CT

CT has been developing to achieve and improve interoperability at the suggested multiple metadata model levels: schema, schema definition language, record, and repository metadata model levels. Please visit Developing CT webpage for more details.

At the schema level, the developed Common Terminology version 1.1 is a set of 12 Common Terms (properties) (less than DC core elements) and 53 qualifiers (sub-properties) (many fewer than 1000 MARC tags and MODS elements).

The Selected 12 Common Terms: contributor, date,description, format, identifier,language, publisher, relation, rights, subject, title, and typeGenre.  

53 qualifiers of CT 1.1 are selected to preserve much information of the 1000 MARC tags and many subfields, and elements and attributes of MODS.

Crosswalk MARC, MODS, DC, and QDC to CT 1.1  is designed to clearly show how they are semantically and lexically mapped into CT minimizing loss of information and maximizing preserving the specificity and precision of the source metadata records.

At the schema definition language level, CT is variously represented as XML and RDF schemas and SKOS concepts in order to be understood and used by many communities.

CT Representations (schemas)

for the current version 1.1 :

Versions 

The current version CT 1.1 

Common Terminology version 1.1 is defined as a set of 12 Common Terms (property) and 53 qualifiers (subproperty) with CTScheme. The Common Terms are especially, common element names of widely used metadata schemas (e.g., MARC, MODS, DC & QDC).

12 Common Terms are contributor, date, description, format, identifier, language, publisher, relation, rights, subject, title, and typeGenre.

53 qualifiers of CT 1.1 are selected to preserve much information of the 1000 MARC tags and many subfields, and elements and attributes of MODS.

CTScheme is an enumerated set of resources used as a controlled set of values including authorities, Syntax Encoding Scheme and Vocabulary Encoding Scheme of DCMI. CTScheme includes CTTypeGenre, CTFormat, CTRelator, CTLanguage, CTDescription, CTIdentifier, and CTSubject.

Prior Version CT 1.1 (before 01/18/17)

Prior Version CT 1.0

The CT version 1.0 came out finally in March 2014. But, it is modified and improved by reviewers into version 1.1.
  • CT version 1.0 schema in XML form is ct.xsd.
  • CT version 1.0 schema in RDF` form is ct.rdf.
  • CT documentation for version 1.0 is CT version 1.0. 

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