Metadata Working Group

Working Group Objectives

ISO/IEC JTC 1 / SC 32 / WG 02

Terms of Reference (WG2 BNE 008)

Sub-Committee 32 Data management & Interchange

Terms of reference of SC32 as agreed at the February 1998 meeting are:

Standards for data management within and among local distributed information systems environments. SC 32 provides enabling technologies to promote harmonisation of data management facilities across sector-specific areas.

Specifically, SC 32 standards include:

1. Reference models and frameworks for the coordination of existing and emerging standards;

2. Definition of data domains, data types and data structures, and their associated semantics;

3. Languages, services and protocols for persistent storage, concurrent access, concurrent update and interchange of data;

4. Methods, languages and services and protocols to structure, organise and register metadata and other information resources associated with sharing and interoperability, including electronic commerce.

SC32 now has five Working Groups:

§ WG 1 Open-edi

§ WG 2 Metadata

§ WG 3 Database languages

§ WG 4 SQL multimedia & application packages

§ WG 5 Remote Database Access

Working Group 2 Metadata

The following draft terms of reference were prepared by a small sub-group of WG2 members at the February 1998 SC32 meeting, and will be further considered as part of WG2's agenda for its July 1998 meeting:

WG2 Metadata

This Working Group has responsibility for the development of common facilities that help to make data understandable and shareable. This includes specific methodologies for the:

· specification and standardisation of data elements, value domains and other data concepts;

· coding methods and principles;

· metadata repository management; and

· metadata interchange over intranets, the World Wide Web, and other media.