The task group aims to define an application profile that allows for making assertions about description statements or description sets. The AP should create a shared model of the data elements required to satisfactorily describe an aggregation of metadata statements in order to collectively import, asses, use and publish facts about the quality, rights, timeliness, data source type, trust situation, etc. of the described statements. Since metadata provenance information is in itself metadata, it should be possible to be republished in quite the same way and in conjunction with the metadata statements or sets it describes. The task group is charged to also create usage guidelines that outline ways to connect “content” metadata aggregations with its provenance metadata in a way robust enough to survive multiple republication processes.

The task group is expected to leverage previous work done in this area by the AC – Administrative Components draft and parts of the DC Collections AP by focusing on both administrative and descriptive metadata, as both contain elements that are relevant to a more inclusive view of metametadata. An initial proposal for a task group was submitted to the Advisory Board during DC‐2009 in Seoul. In the meantime, Kai Eckert and Michael Panzer have participated in the weekly teleconferences of the W3C Provenance XG. The Incubator Group is charged with producing requirements and state‐of‐the‐art reports on the area of provenance for Semantic Web technologies, both of which will be used as input for defining the AP. Should follow‐on activities of the Incubator Group include standardization, the AP developed by the task group would provide input both as a use case and as a source of requirements.

2010‐05‐12