Readings for 10-4 - 10-8

Database - Wikipedia Article
I have known the concept of what a database is for awhile now (ever since I began my undergraduate career.)  However, I never knew that they were as complicated as they seem to be, according to the Wikipedia article.  I think the most interesting aspect of databases is how they can be classified by the types of their content, which includes: bibiographic, document-text, statistical, etc.  It was also the first time I had encountered the concept of database management systems (DMS), which store database contents, allowing the creation and maintainence of data, and searching and other accessing.  A final concept that was new to me was the three levels of database architecture: external, internal, and conceptual.  The external level is for users and how they understand the organization of the data.  The internal level consists of the physical storage of data and how it is processed in the computing system.  Finally, the conceptual level seems to balance the internal and external levels.

Introduction to Metadata
I never knew what metadata was until I came to the University of Pittsburgh.  In general, metadata is data about data.  I thought the fact that all information objects have the three features of content, context, and structure was a very important theme in understanding metadata.  Content relates to what the object contains, context relates to all the informational aspects of the objects creation, and structure relates to the associations of individual objects which can be contextual, content related, or both.  Probably the most important thing to understand about metadata is that it identifies and describes the object, documents how the object behaves, the objects funtion and use, its relationship to other objects, and it has been managed over time.

An Overview of the Dublin Core Data Model
It seems to me that the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is a large effort to discover diverse resources in an electronic environment that spans across many different disciplines.  Since this is largely an international effort, I would expect that the funding of such a large initiative would be extremely difficult as it seems to be very expensive.  Some functional requirements include: internationalization, extensibility, element identity, semantic refinement, identification of encoding schemes, specification of controlled vocabularies, and identification of structured compound values.  These requirements seem difficult to develope, especially since there are many obstacles to get over when the international community is involved.  I think this idea would take a long time to create, but hopefully, if it does succeed, it can bring other countries and cultures together in hopes of bettering communication and figuring out solutions to many problems.