Jon Phipps
I'm currently an independent consultant employed by the Cornell University Library to lead the development of a Metadata Registry [1] -- a not-for-profit project funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation -- as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) [2]. In the past I have been the technical lead of the Cornell Computer Science Department's Core Integration [3] effort for the NSDL and before that manager of software development at knovel.com [4], a scientific and materials database publisher. In the increasingly distant past, and in a different career path, I ran a commercial printing company with my father, and owned a typesetting company specializing in advertising typography and (oddly) database conversion and publishing.
After I attended a tutorial on SKOS given by Alistair at the Dublin Core meeting in Madrid in 2005, we decided to base the controlled vocabulary section of the Registry on SKOS. We believe that the Registry project, which has already been in active development for over a year, will be one of the first SKOS-based production meta-thesauri. There is currently an early production release (NOT a demo) of the controlled vocabulary section of the Metadata Registry [5].
We also intend the Registry to be a functional bridge between RDF- and XML-based thesauri, acting as a semantic Rosetta stone for thesaurus, taxonomy, and controlled vocabulary maintainers; allowing expression of concepts in many formats from a single source database.
Jon Phipps
Cornell University Library
Ithaca, NY, USA
Email: <jp298 AT SPAMFREE cornell DOT edu>
MadCreek Associates
Vestal, NY, USA
Email: <jphipps AT SPAMFREE madcreek DOT com>
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