Mapping between the Dublin Core Abstract Model DCAM and the TMDM

Abstract

Dublin Core is a widely used metadata vocabulary. There is ongoing standardisation work for the usage of DC-vocabularies in Topic Maps. Although the DC-vocabularies are already used in RDF, XML and HTML, they are defined independently of any particular encoding syntax. The DCMI Abstract Model (DCAM) is the metamodel for the DC vocabulary. It should facilitate the development of better mappings and interoperability. In a first step, this paper describes the relationships between the DCAM and the Topic Maps metamodel (TMDM). Afterwards, the directed DCAM(TMDM and TMDM(DCAM mappings are defined. The DCAM(TMDM mapping, combined with a serialisation specification for a Topic Maps notation, is an encoding guideline for this Topic Maps notation. For the ongoing standardisation of the usage of DC-vocabularies we propose a two layers approach. The first is the mapping defined here, which assures the interoperability between DC-metadata in Topic Maps and documented in other representation formats. The second layer provides authoring guidelines for Topic Maps authors describing DC-metadata. Strictly adhering to these authoring guidelines will assure that the created topic maps can be mapped to the DCAM and, much more important, become always be mergeable (irrespective of the DCAM in the background).