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The article presents information related to online information storage and retrieval systems. National Information Standards Organization's newest publication is "Understanding Metadata,": a general introduction to metadata, that includes an overview of leading metadata contenders and examples of practical applications. The journal "Digital Document Quarterly," argues that the technical component of digital preservation research and development should focus on the design and management of digital objects "hardened" for durability.

This article reports that a new electronic mail list has been launched for people who are involved in describing resources using metadata schemas based on the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard. The lom-cataloguing list came about after a workshop in London last year that brought together staff from a variety of projects using the LOM to catalogue resources. It became evident that many untrained and non-LIS qualified staff were employed in such activities, and they needed support and help, and to be in contact with each other.

This article focuses on identifiers and identification systems (IS) from a library perspective. The possibility for linking different IS with metadata and related services has changed the patterns of institutional identification systems. The visibility of creative and scientific content on the Net depends on reliable identification. So also is the ability of a user to select material freely and without distortion from any commercial influence. The Overview table provided in this article may give the impression that the library community has the major role in determining what type of identifier will become the most useful and ubiquitous.

The article reports on the release of BS 8419 Interoperability between metadata systems used for learning, education and training, a two-part Code of Practice that gives recommendations for achieving interoperability between systems by the BSI Business Information company. The BS 8419 is applicable across all sectors and levels of learning, education and training. Part I of the code of practice provides recommendations for any organization creating application profiles of international metadata standards for use in relation to teaching and learning. Part 2 provides recommendations for methodologies that will enable developers and implementers to maximize interoperability, focusing on how to make data transfer between metadata systems as automatic as possible.

The article focuses on the use of the Dublin Core metadata scheme in the corporate sector. To gain a hands-on metadata experience, a good place to start is the Properties box in Microsoft Office. Few people know it exists, and even those who do rarely bother to fill it in. The reality is that most organizations have little understanding of the nature and value of metadata, the cost of adding it to documents, and the impact of not being able to locate documents when metadata is poorly managed. One common fallacy about metadata in that it is just adding keywords to documents, which is perpetuated by content management system vendors who should know better than to provide metadata boxes in templates labeled Keywords. It may be said that there are four broad categories of metadata: Structural metadata describes the information architecture of the document; Content metadata provides a way of identifying documents that may contain relevant subject information; Descriptive metadata enables the type of document to be identified; and administrative metadata deals with the person and department owing the document, the date the document would be checked for relevancy, and the language of the document.

This article discusses issues related to reusability in electronic designing. Anyone embarking on an SoC design knows that the job involves stitching together relatively large blocks of Internet Protocol (IP). That may sound like a relatively easy task, but anyone in-the-know will tell people it's not. Integrating IP unleashes a host of difficulties, not the least of which is coercing any given design methodology to seamlessly handle any given piece of IP. But an industry consortium, formed just two years ago, is making headway toward solving this difficult problem. Researchers at Philips realized that rather than make the IP fit each design-flow scenario, it's best to standardize all IP in terms of how it fits into flows. Spirit was formed to develop a standard method of packaging IP. These metadata descriptions are applicable to both new and legacy IP. They don't impose or enforce any design style on the IP authors. The descriptions themselves are created while IP blocks are imported into Spirit-compliant SoC design tools.

The article reports that some of the enterprises that are deftly moving toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to exploit the potential of Web services are confronting challenges technology cannot always conquer. Users say Web services still suffer from a lack of clear metadata definitions and the need for sometimes significant IT cultural changes. Trimble Navigation Ltd., a Sunnyvale, California-based maker of Global Positioning System products, opted to use an SOA framework from Cordys Inc., to integrate the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems of its five business units. But as the project has moved forward, it has been slowed by the lack of standard metadata definitions, which define and describe applications' data, said Robert Denis, vice president and CIO at Trimble. Denis said that the company must create its own process for managing the disparate ERP systems' metadata because of a lack of tools that can automate the operation. Navitaire, an application service provider that houses reservation systems for low-cost airlines, early this year will begin exposing applications as Web services to allow customers to more easily customize them, said Mark Learning, Navitaire's vice president of production development.