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Glossary

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A

AGIFT

Australian Governments’ Interactive Functions Thesaurus. An online interactive version of AGIFT is available from the National Archives of Australia website.

ANZSCO

Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations maintained by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

ANZLIC

Spatial Information Council.

ANZSIC

Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification maintained by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

APAIS

Australian Public Affairs Information Service Thesaurus maintained by the National Library of Australia. This is an archived resource.

APT

Australian Pictorial Thesaurus, a collection of topic terms for indexing Australian images. This is an archived resource.

ASGC

Australian Standard Geographic Classification maintained by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Includes all Australian Local Government Areas, regions and suburbs. Note: the ASGC was superseded by the ASGS in 2011

Application profile

A declaration of the metadata terms an organisation, information resource, application or user community uses in its metadata. This includes the set of metadata elements, policies and guidelines defined for a particular application or implementation.

B

Box

DCMI Box Encoding Scheme, a Syntax Encoding Scheme for identifying a region of space using its geographic limits.

C

Class

A group containing members that have attributes, behaviours, relationships or semantics in common; a kind of category.

D

DCMES

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. See Dublin Core.

DCMI

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. See Dublin Core.

DCMI Abstract Model

A set of components and constructs used in Dublin Core metadata, providing an information model independent of any encoding syntax.

DCMIType

DCMI Type Vocabulary. A generic controlled vocabulary for the type property.

DCSV

Dublin Core Structured Values. A syntax for writing a list of labelled values in a text string.

Described resource

A resource that is described by a description.

Description

One or more statements about a resource.

Description set

A set of one or more descriptions, each of which describes a resource.

DOI

Digital Object Identifier. A system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment.

Domain

A relationship between a property and a class which indicates that if the property is part of a property/value pair, then it follows that the

described resource is an instance of that class.

Dublin Core (DC)

An internationally recognised core set of metadata properties on which AGLS is based. More information is available from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative website.

E

EdNA

Education Network Australia was a network of education information and services. The EdNA metadata standard is based on the Dublin Core set. It is no longer available. An alternative resource is the Schools Online Thesaurus (ScOT)

Element

See property.

Element refinement

A synonym for property. The word element is also commonly used to refer to a structural markup component within an XML document.

Embedded metadata

Metadata that is stored and maintained within the resource or object it describes.

Encoding scheme

See Vocabulary Encoding Scheme and Syntax Encoding Scheme.

G

GOLD

Government Online Directory of Australian Commonwealth government agencies and employees.

H

HTML

HyperText Markup Language.

HTML META Tag

An approach to encoding metadata in HTML documents.

I

IANA

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the coordinator for the assignment of unique parameter values for Internet protocols.

IETF

Internet Engineering Task Force, the international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.

IMT

Internet Media Types.

ISBN

International Standard Book Number.

ISO

International Organization for Standardization.

ISO 639

Codes for the representation of names of languages.

ISO 3166

Codes for representations of names of countries and their subdivisions.

ISO 8601

Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times.

ISO 15386

Information and documentation – The Dublin Core metadata element set. A PDF copy is available from the International Organization for Standardization website.

ISO 15924

Codes for the representation of names of scripts.

ISO 19115

International Standard: Geographic Information – Metadata.

ISSN

International Standard Serial Number.

L

LCSH

Library of Congress Subject Headings is a thesaurus of subject headings maintained by the United States Library of Congress for use in

bibliographic records.

Literal

The value of a metadata property that can be either a hyperlink (URI) or a string value (free text).

M

MESH

Medical Subject Headings is a thesaurus of medical subject terms developed by the United States National Library of Medicine.

Metadata

Structured, machine-processible information that describes and/or enables finding, managing, controlling, understanding or preserving other information over time.

Metadata record

A syntactically correct representation of the descriptive information (metadata) for an information resource.

N

Namespace

A logical grouping of metadata terms. Namespaces allow unique identification of metadata terms to allow those terms to be unambiguously used across applications.

P

Period

DCMI Period Encoding Scheme is a Syntax Encoding Scheme for indicating a single time interval.

Point

DCMI Point Encoding Scheme, a Syntax Encoding Scheme for identifying a point in space using its geographic coordinates.

Property

A specific aspect, characteristic, attribute or relation used to describe a resource (previously called ‘elements’). Dublin Core and AGLS

metadata terms are properties.

Property/Value Pair

The combination of a property and a value, used to describe a characteristic of a resource.

Q

Qualifier

See property, Vocabulary Encoding Scheme and Syntax Encoding Scheme.

R

Range

A relationship between a property and a class which indicates that if the property is part of a property/value pair, then it follows that the value is an instance of that class.

RDF

Resource Description Framework for metadata syntax and interoperability.

Resource

Anything that has an identity. Examples include an electronic document, an image, a service and a collection of other resources. Not all resources are network retrievable; humans, corporations, physical objects and electronic documents on portable media are also resources.

RFC

Request For Comment, the process of establishing a standard on the Internet. More information is available at the Internet Engineering Task Force website.

RFC 2119

Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels.

RFC 3986

Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax.

RFC 4646

Tags for Identifying Languages.

S

Schema

A machine-processible specification that defines the structure and syntax of metadata in a formal schema language.

Service

A service exists where a relationship exists between a business function of an organisation and the identified needs of an individual client or a group of clients.

Sub-property

A property of a resource which shares the meaning of another property but with narrower semantics (previously called ‘element refinements’).

Syntax Encoding Scheme

Indicates that the value is a string formatted in accordance with a formal notation or externally defined standard.

U

URI

Uniform Resource Identifier is a syntax for all names/addresses for resources on the World Wide Web, includes Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Name (URN). See also Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, ... and RFC 3986.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator is a technique for indicating the name and location of Internet resources. See also Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, ...

URN

Uniform Resource Name, a technique for indicating the name and location of Internet resources that has some assurance of persistence

beyond that normally associated with an Internet domain or host name. More information is available at the World Wide Web Consortium website.

UUID

Universally Unique Identifier is a unique, persistent identifier capable of being generated on demand without requiring a central registration process. UUIDs consist of 32 hexadecimal digits in the form 8-4-4-4-12, eg 6ba7b810-9dad-11d1-80b4-00c04fd430c8. UUIDs are a form of URN. More information is available in RFC 4122.

V

Value

The content of a metadata property providing information about a characteristic of a resource.

Vocabulary Encoding Scheme

Indicates that the value is a term from a controlled vocabulary.

W

W3C

World Wide Web Consortium is the international consortium that develops web standards, guidelines and protocols.

X

XHTML

eXtensible HyperText Markup Language. A reformulation of HTML 4.01 conforming to XML syntax. See also XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition).

XML

eXtensible Markup Language.

Date this page was last updated: 2013-07-09 11:37

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