Document Management and Sharing Markup Language

Metadata are a key mechanism for effective management, search and reuse of information in organizations, as a large amount of information is available in unstructured format. Existing metadata specifications map incompletely to requirements of document management in organizations, as they usually aim at representing intrinsic properties of documents (title, author, keywords, etc). In organizations, the value of information depends also on the context of use (e.g. by whom, how and where information is accessed). In order to address these needs we propose a Metadata Model called DMSML (Document Management and Sharing Markup Language), which represents both intrinsic and context-of-use properties of documents. The metadata set should address requirements of genericity, extensibility and interoperability. Especially in order to facilitate interoperability we aim at integrating existing widely accepted standards in the DMSML specification. As regards extensibility, end users should be made capable of extending and refining the metadata set for specific application purposes, without being exposed to technical implementation details. Towards this end we investigate how conceptual modelling can support integration and reuse of the DMSML metadata set and we propose a three-layer Metadata Model, which includes a conceptual, a logical and an XML-schema based syntax layer.