Tuesday, 5/2/2017
Ana Alice Baptista,
Assistant Professor from the Department of Information Systems (DSI) of the
School of Engineering of the University of Minho (EEUM), was named chair-elect
of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative’s (DCMI) Governing Board and will assume
the position of chair in this Autumn. The researcher shared her pathway since
the election in September 2016.
Ana Alice Baptista, Assistant Professor from the Department of
Information Systems (DSI) of the School of Engineering of the University of
Minho (EEUM) and researcher at the ALGORITMI Research Centre (ALGORITMI) of the
EEUM was named, in September 2016, chair-elect of the Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative’s (DCMI) Governing Board and will assume the position of chair in
this Autumn. Working as a team with the chair and past chair since September,
the researcher is the first woman and the first person from a
Portuguese-speaking country to assume this position.
The DCMI is an international initiative that supports shared
innovation in design and best practices on global metadata. This initiative
brings together a wide range of practitioners and communities of practice and research,
encourages discussion, innovation and dissemination of information and provides
specifications and recommendations on metadata globally. It is a highly
interdisciplinary initiative involving professionals from different areas, from
Computer Science to Archival Science, to less expected ones such as
Architecture or Medicine. Its most popular recommendation is the Dublin Core
Metadata Element Set (DCMES - the first version started in 1995), better known
only as Dublin Core, a set of fifteen metadata elements that are widely used on
the Web in a variety of domains and with several goals. Metadata is data about
data, information about information resources. For example, a book may be
described using metadata relating to title, authors, publisher, date of
publication, among others. "We have many kinds of resources on the Web, such
as books, articles, websites, information services, and we need to describe
them. The DCMI allows resources from several areas to have a similar nuclear
set, so we can compare the descriptions and relate these data”, Ana Alice
Baptista explains. This initiative is closely linked to data movement, Semantic Web and Linked
Data.
As
DCMI's chair-elect and future chair, the researcher outlines two key axes of
action focused on inclusion: the first is related with increasing DCMI's
influence in regions of the globe where its action needs to intensify and where
this initiative comes with more difficulty. "The DCMI has an impact across
the globe, but certain regions are less impacted by this type of initiatives because
of their geographic, social and economic condition, as is the case of Latin
America and Asia", the researcher highlights. The second axis focuses on
women's participation in the DCMI and the metadata communities and information systems
in general. "Although
there are many women, they seem to be underrepresented in certain positions. It
is my intention to contribute and increase the participation and visibility of
women, because I am also very concerned about gender equality”, Ana Alice
Baptista reinforces. Despite having seen this election as a unique opportunity
for the challenge that it represents, Ana Alice Baptista confesses that she did
not take the decision in the immediate because it is a position "with a
lot of responsibility
and visibility. On the other hand, it is very appealing because it gives me the
opportunity to put many ideas into practice”.
Ana Alice Baptista completed her 1st cycle degree in Systems
and Informatics Engineering in 1991 and her PhD in Information Systems and
Technologies in 2003, both at the University of Minho. She develops her
activity in the DSI of the EEUM since 1994 and she is a researcher at the
ALGORITMI Research Centre of the EEUM. She is the chair-elect of the DCMI and she also
co-chairs the DCMI Education & Outreach Committee (DC-EOC). She is author
or co-author of more than 60 scientific articles. She was Vice-Director of the
MSc degree in Information Sciences and a member of the steering committee of
the Doctoral Programme on Information Systems and Technologies. Ana Alice
Baptista also supervised several students both at MSc and PhD levels,
participated in several R&D projects and was an evaluator of project
proposals under FP7. She has been a reviewer on several conferences and
journals of recognised merit. Her main areas of interest include Metadata,
Linked Data and the Open Movement under their technological and social perspectives.
+ info: http://www.dsi.uminho.pt/; http://algoritmi.uminho.pt/; http://dublincore.org/
