NIST HOSTS METADATA COMMITTEES.

NIST recently hosted the meeting of two organizations with a focus on metadata descriptions and registries. The ANSI NCITS L8 Metadata Committee had a Special Interest Group and Plenary meeting to discuss progress in standardizing descriptions for data elements and other forms of metadata. Metadata is the data that defines and documents the data found in databases, e-commerce messages, XML tags, and other forms of information exchanged among information technology systems. NCITS L8 is the Technical Advisory Group (national liaison) for ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 WG2, also called Metadata. The major focus of both standards committees is the development of ISO/IEC 11179, Metadata Registries (MDR), and associated Technical Reports. An allied group, the Metadata Registry Implementers Coalition (MDRIC), also met. The MDRIC is an organization for information and tool designers who are building metadata registries based on the ISO/IEC 11179 standard.

NCITS L8 and MDRIC meet regularly at NIST. The focus of this meeting was the relationship between MDR-based registries and XML. Linking these two standards areas will promote interoperability and help ensure that people and organizations can make the best use of the resources available on the Web.

NIST is planning a 2 day event in September 2001 that will focus on MDR, XML, and related issues. For more information, see http://xw2k.sdct.itl.nist.gov/l8/.