Interoperability

The Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) ceased operations. The responsibility over the CIMI XML Schema for description of museum objects was transferred to the organization which is responsible for the SPECTRUM standard upon which it is based (MDA).[16] The CIMI XML Schema is useful for “migrating data, the sharing of information between applications, and as an interchange format of OAI (Open Archives Initiative) metadata harvesting” [17]

In their proposal for an interoperable framework for description of photographs using the element set SEPIADES, Kremer & Sesink (2003) point out that photographic archives “tend to add or remove elements from these standards and in doing so invalidate compatibility with other standard implementations.” (Kremer & Sesink 2003, 135) The variability of collections and complexity and difficulty in analysis of the visual medium suggests that heterogeneous metadata standards will continue to exist for the increasing number of digitalized archives. Initiatives such as the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), implemented with the help of Extensible Markup Language (XML) will continue to gain importance for their ability to provide search functionality across different archives: “data providers offer their metadata to automatic harvesters run by service providers [that in turn] offer indexing capabilities and retrieval of the harvested metadata records” (Kremer & Sesink 2003, 137).

Resource Description Framework (RDF) is another XML-compatible common framework (parsers and processing tools) intended to facilitate the interoperability of metadata between applications[18]. Reporting on the retrieval of image content through metadata searching, Addis et al (2003) use RDF in ARTISTE extensively to provide a “way to establish a common semantics between heterogeneous digital libraries containing image collections.” (Addis et al 2003, 95). Like OAI-PMH, RDF is open to accept all kinds of property vocabularies (XML Namespaces), and as such offers a platform for integrating large collections of metadata on the web through web applications into searchable environments.