Joab Jackson, First draft of revised Data Reference Model released, GCN, June 13, 2005. Excerpt: 'The federal Data Reference Model working group released the first draft of the DRM Specification today. The working group is now soliciting feedback from government agencies before it submits the DRM to the Office of Management and Budget this fall. The release of the DRM draft is an "important milestone" in the federal government's efforts to better share information, said OMB chief architect Richard Burke. He spoke at the Data Reference Model Public Forum held today in Washington in conjunction with the federal CIO Council's quarterly Emerging Technology Components conference. "No one has tried this before at this scale," Burke said. "This will provide an open and well-documented standard that will enable the organization and categorization of government information in the ways that are searchable and interoperable across agencies....The DRM was designed primarily to give agencies a common framework to share data. The DRM can be used in conjunction with the National Information Exchange Model, a separate DHS and Justice Department effort to establish a basic terminology for marking data across all agencies. NIEM standardizes the language that two agencies can use to share data, while the DRM sets a standard format for describing sharable data that other agencies can discover and use, [Michael] Daconta [metadata program manager for the Homeland Security Department] said. "Today we move the abstract to the concrete," Daconta said of the release of the draft. "This is a detailed blueprint of how organizations are going to describe the structure, categorization and exchange of their information. This is not abstract anymore."' If you have comments on the new spec, attend one of the upcoming public meetings, subscribe to the DRM Public Forum, or click on one of the comment links scattered throughout the spec itself.
(PS: Note that "DRM" here means Data Reference Model, not Digital Rights Management. It's designed to promote sharing, not to hinder it. Because the other DRM's usual purpose and effect is to hinder sharing, and because it's already so well-known or notorious, the working group really should have looked for a different acronym.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/18/2005 08:30:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
