My colleagues describe an approach to managing metadata crosswalks in the current issue of D-Lib Magazine.
This paper proposes a model for metadata crosswalks that associates three pieces of information: the crosswalk, the source metadata standard, and the target metadata standard, each of which may have a machine-readable encoding and human-readable description. The crosswalks are encoded as METS records that are made available to a repository for processing by search engines, OAI harvesters, and custom-designed Web services. The METS object brings together all of the information required to access and interpret crosswalks and represents a significant improvement over previously available formats. But it raises questions about how best to describe these complex objects and exposes gaps that must eventually be filled in by the digital library community. [A Repository of Metadata Crosswalks]
This builds nicely on several pieces of technology and is already being used to support research systems.
