A Metadata Infrastructure for a Repository of Civil Engineering Records: EAC-CPF as a Cornerstone for Content Publishing

Abstract

The Historical Archive of Civil Engineering aims to create a repository of digitized archival materials related to the work of relevant Spanish civil engineers. One of the challenges is the need to identify the most appropriate metadata schemas for the description of different materials. Descriptive standards besides EAD must be applied to provide end-users with descriptions of the engineering works, bibliographic items, manuscripts, etc., and to contextualize them in view of the activities and life events of the record creators. EAC-CPF can thus provide the context necessary to browse and understand the descriptions of engineering records, documents, and works.

KEYWORDS:

• EAD
• EAC-CPF
• civil engineering
• VRA-Core
• engineering metadata

Notes

¹ Ricardo Eíto-Brun, “Applying EAD to Historical Engineering Archives: The Holdings of Carlos Fernández Casado,” Scire 17, no. 1 (2011): 35–39.

² Marcus Bingenheimer, Jen-Jou Hung, and Simon Wiles, “Markup meets GIS—Visualizing the ‘Biographies of Eminent Duddhist Monks,’ ” Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualisation (2009): 550–554, describes the implementation of a collection with more than 1300 hagio-biographies based on TEI/XML and KML (Keyhole Markup Language) to support GIS visualization based on GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps. The implementation incorporated authority control built on top of a relational database.

³ Alternatives for encoding biographies were proposed in the professional bibliography, for example Antonio M. Calvo, “Structuring Biographical Data in EAD with the Nomen DTD,” OCLC Systems & Services 17, no. 4 (2001): 187–199. Other schemas with the same purpose were BIO, http://vocab.org/bio/0.1/.html and BiogML, http://application.synthesys.info/downloads/NA_Documents/Deliverables/NA%20D/D2.3.2%20BiogML-Report.pdf.

⁴ Ray R. Larson, “Demonstration: Bringing Lives to Light: Browsing and Searching Biographical Information with a Metadata Infrastructure,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4675 (2007): 539–542.

⁵ Katherine M. Wisser, “Describing Entities and Identities: The Development and Structure of Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families,” Journal of Library Metadata 11, no. 3–4 (2011): 166–175.

⁶ Livio de Luca, Chawee Busayarat, Chiara Stefani, Phillipe Véron, and Michel Florenzano “A Semantic-based Platform for the Digital Analysis of Architectural Heritage,” Computers and Graphics 35, no. 2: 227–241, describes a system that supports the digital analysis and virtualization of architectural heritage buildings.

⁷ Institution of Civil Engineers, Panel for Historical Engineering Works (PHEW) Handbook (London: ICE, 2006). Available at: http://www.ice.org.uk/Information-resources/Document-Library/PHEW-handbook

⁸ See: Keith Mackie, “Prospectus for a Project to Conserve Old Engineering Drawings,” Civil Engineering: Magazine of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering 21, no. 7 (Aug 2013): 79–80; Tony Murray, “The Woodhead Dam is Awarded ASCE International Landmark status,” Civil Engineering : Magazine of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering 16, no. 10 (Oct 2008): 2–3; Marie Ashpole, “Van Stadens Dam First SAICE Historic Civil Engineering Landmark,” Civil Engineering: Magazine of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering 19, no. 3 (Apr 2011) : 64, also provide information about this initiative.

⁹ Detailed information about these schemas is available at the following sites: LIDO: http://network.icom.museum/cidoc/working-groups/data-harvesting-and-interchange/lido-technical/specificat-ion/Object ID: http://archives.icom.museum/object-id/VRA Core: http://www.loc.gov/standards/vra-core/

¹⁰ Available at: http://www.cidoc-crm.org/

¹¹ Available at: http://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa/index.html

¹² Elham Andaroodi and Asanobu Kitamoto, “Architectural Heritage Online: Ontology-driven Website Generation for World Heritage Sites in Danger,” Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) 6436 (2010): 277–290, describes an online knowledge base that combines the use of Core Data Index to Historic Buildings and Monuments (part of Object ID) to describe world heritage sites in danger and Dublin Core to describe photos, videos, sketches, and architectural drawings; Athanasios D. Styliadis, Ipek I. Akbaylar, Despoina A. Papadopoulou, Nikolaos D. Hasanagas, Sotiria A. Roussa, and Lazaros A. Sexidis, “Metadata-based Heritage Sites Modelling with e-learning Functionality,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 10, no. 2: 296–312, also applied the Object ID schema in a project focused on the 3D geometric and semantic description of the Galerius Palace Octagonon at Thessaloniki, Greece.

¹³ Available at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/vracore/

¹⁴ Carl Lagoze, Jane Hunter, and Dan Brickley, “An Event-Aware Model for Metadata Interoperability,” Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1923 (2000): 103–116.

¹⁵ Paolo Missier, Khalid Belhajjame, and James Cheney, “The W3C PROV Family of Specifications for Modelling Provenance Metadata”, EDBT/ICDT ‘13 March 18–22 2013, Genoa, Italy, http://www.edbt.org/Proceedings/2013-Genova/papers/edbt/a80-missier.pdf

¹⁶ W3C, “PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model” W3C Recommendation 30 April 2013. Available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-prov-dm-20130430/