CDWA

[ JISC Standards Catalogue Home Page \| Standards Entries Home Page \| Document Standards \| Web Standards \| Geographic Information \| Image Standards \| Multimedia Standards \| Metadata Standards \| Search Protocols \| Internet Transport Standards \| Distributed Searching Standards \| Metadata Harvesting Standards \| Alerting Standards \| Identifier Standards \| Programming Language Standards \| Character Encoding Standards \| e-Learning Standards ]

Standard: Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) defines categories for use in describing and accessing information about art, architecture or cultural objects, along with any related images. It includes more than 500 categories or sub-categories, thirty-six of which are identified as 'core'. In addition to the full standard, there is also CDWA Lite, a simplified version, encoded as XML and compatible with OAI-PMH. CDWA is closely related to the content standard Cataloguing Cultural Objects (CCO), which provides guidelines on how information should be entered into selected CDWA and VRA Core categories.

Standardisation: CDWA was developed by the US-based Art Information Task Force (AITF), with funding from the J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the College Art Association (CAA). It is now maintained by the Getty Research Institute, who have developed CWDA Lite.

Versions: The current version of CDWA (2.0) was published in 2000 and revised in 2006. CDWA Lite 1.1 (current) was published in July 2006.

Maturity: CDWA was developed in the 1990s and is well established. CDWA Lite is a new standard and not yet widely used. Crosswalks are available to other common standards (e.g. VRA Core, MARC, MODS and EAD).

Risk Assessment: Because CDWA is so extensive, is non-prescriptive (despite its 'core'), and does not enforce a particular data structure or encoding, implementations of this standard will vary considerably. The tighter structure and encoding of CDWA Lite will support interoperability, but its stability and take-up is currently uncertain.

Take-up Elsewhere: The extent of take-up of CDWA is unknown. It is likely that institutions and projects have been selective in their implementation rather than incorporating the entire standard.