Research Question 4

Matchbox will not contain resources but rather the information that is necessary to discover and retrieve resources. It is an hypothesis that multimedia descriptions may, in some situations, be more valued than textual ones, especially for retrieval. How the multimedia descriptions should be related to the resources and records of them (either as part of the record or automatically associated with it) is a related research question.

Note that in the introduction, we stated that:

"Earlier attempts to develop data management systems have resulted in incompatible, widely dispersed databases. More recently, the model of subject gateways with Dublin Core (DC) formats has been developed. These catalogues are web-enabled but lack the richness now available from the use of Qualified Dublin Core (QDC) and Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Dublin Core provides a classification model and a metadata set primarily for inclusion in web pages in HTML, the markup language for the world wide web. Each DC element is a category of classification and can be qualified in respect of the element or its values. DC compliant metadata is interchangeable in as much as it is in a common format. Subject gateways are repositories of DC metadata related to web resources and accessed via the gateway as pointers to the original resources. Recently released Qualified Dublin Core elements are structured and so more comprehensive than the original DC elements and can be expressed in XML satisfying the recently developed Resource Description Framework. This richer metadata is interoperable as metadata elements and values can be related one to another."

Note newly released RDF for DC and QDC - see DC-general list....