Metadata chairs: Tom Baker and Clifford Lynch Group Scope and Focus This group will focus on defining key research issues in metadata and laying the groundwork for the development of specific metadata project proposals by subsets of the participants. The group's primary product is expected to be a report outlining the metadata research agenda as viewed by the participants. There is a great diversity of perspectives on metadata issues and different communities view metadata in radically different contexts -- for example, the various subdisciplines within computer science, information and library science, cultural heritage organizations, the legal community, and those concerned with electronic commerce all regard metadata as an essential component of the evolving networked information environment, but each of these communities define and scope metadata differently. We hope to develop a coherent set of research topics that will advance the understanding of metadata and which might provide a framework for a coordinated set of research efforts. In addition, we will attempt to define necessary components in the network software and service infrastructure (some of which are often called "middleware") which involve metadata, including registry systems and databases, uniform resource citations, resolvers, and translators. Finally, the group will seek to clarify the research issues surrounding work on emerging standards such as Dublin Core. Our view is that discussions of metadata outside of specific applications contexts tends to be much less useful than those that are in support of specific objectives, such as discovery and retrieval, indexing, or terms and conditions. Consequently, we believe that it is essential that the metadata working group collaborate closely with other groups involved in the joint ERCIM-NSF effort; this is reflected in our operating plan (see below). Operating Plan There are a large number of researchers who are involved in various metadata efforts and who will be able to contribute to the work of this group. Thus, it is our intention to open our meetings and online discussions to additional participants (attending at their own expense) who may be able to help with our work, subject to the constraint that the group remain sufficiently small to work effectively. Because of the need to maintain close coordination with other working groups -- specifically, the groups on distributed indexing, interoperability, and legal issues -- we extend to each of these groups the invitation to have one of their members attend our meetings. We ask that a similar invitation be extended to our membership from the leaders of these other groups. We propose to schedule our first meeting in January or February 1998 so that when we meet we will have the benefit of the results from the first meetings of as many of the other groups as possible. We propose to hold our second meeting in August or September 1998, hopefully back-to-back with the distributed indexing working group to facilitate further cross participation.