categoryallspace2-Articles Information Design Metadata http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Information-Design/Metadata A directory of resources about articles and information design and metadata in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Information-Design/Metadata http://tc.eserver.org/31524.html http://tc.eserver.org/31524.html What began in 1998 as the Colorado Digitization Project is now known as the Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP). The CDP’s Heritage West database represents not only the primary product of the organization, but also one of the oldest continuously operating collaborative repositories of cultural heritage metadata in the country. As a basis for the author’s forthcoming quantitative and qualitative analysis of Dublin Core metadata in Heritage West, the following article offers a history of how the CDP has, over time, organized and managed the metadata provision for its digitization projects. http://tc.eserver.org/31272.html http://tc.eserver.org/31272.html Firms wrestling with unstructured data such as emails and spreadsheets don't see enterprise content management as the answer to their problems. http://tc.eserver.org/30062.html http://tc.eserver.org/30062.html The recent emergence of online digital archives has brought educators a major step closer to bringing original, reusable digital objects into undergraduate classrooms. Yet having to search multiple archives through mind-numbing search-and-browse routines can make it extremely difficult for educators to use the repositories successfully in their curriculum. What educators need is a suite of tools that allow them to reduce the search for relevance, expand the metadata with user-specific annotation, and tie the digital libraries' content directly to course materials. The keys to creating these resources are to build distributed networks of users and repositories. Cost containment often severely limits the amount of descriptive metadata that can be catalogued. Students and instructors create topical annotated bibliographies or lists of media clips (or segments of media clips) and 'publish' these for class, work group, or more general use. Allowing teachers and students to annotate and segment media as well as build their own galleries greatly enhance the educational value of digital objects by augmenting the minimal descriptive metadata and facilitating the building of complex digital objects tailored to the needs of specific education standards and curricula. The project uses a METS XML schema that provides an encoding format for administrative, descriptive, and structural metadata that is fully compliant with OAIS, and open source applications to facilitate ingestion and delivery (as well as help to control costs). http://tc.eserver.org/30037.html http://tc.eserver.org/30037.html Metadata is structured data which describes the characteristics of a resource. It shares many similar characteristics to the cataloguing that takes place in libraries, museums and archives. The term 'meta' derives from the Greek word denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind. A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements representing specific attributes of a resource, and each element can have one or more values. http://tc.eserver.org/29575.html http://tc.eserver.org/29575.html This paper examines user-generated metadata as implemented and applied in two web services designed to share and organize digital media to better understand grassroots classification. http://tc.eserver.org/29323.html http://tc.eserver.org/29323.html I was shocked today when I realized I hadn't ever written a post on tagging. At the ASTD TechKnowledge conference, when I explained Web 2.0 to a group, tagging was an integral part of the conversation. But tagging requires you to take a step back from the web, and consider how you think. http://tc.eserver.org/29020.html http://tc.eserver.org/29020.html Work with structured abstracts--which contain sub-headings in a standard order--has suggested that such abstracts contain more information, are of a higher quality, and are easier to search and to read than are traditional abstracts. The aim of this article is to suggest that this work with structured abstracts can be extended to cover scientific articles as a whole. The article outlines a set of sub-headings--drawn from research on academic writing--that can be used to make the presentation of scientific papers easier to read and to write. Twenty published research papers are then analyzed in terms of these sub-headings. The analysis, with some reservations, supports the viability of this approach. http://tc.eserver.org/29172.html http://tc.eserver.org/29172.html An interview with Kevin Shoesmith about information architecture and the challenge of organizing complicated websites. Shoesmith explains about the importance of metadata, providing user-driven organization, taxonomy vs. folksonomy, the Dublin core, the usability of web menus. http://tc.eserver.org/28574.html http://tc.eserver.org/28574.html Metadata from the world of librarians and database searching is moving to center stage in our everyday lives. And the metadata 'revolution' is coming to us through pictures--those cute, happy, funny shots of kids, parents, neighbors and workmates that we love to share and post on the internet. http://tc.eserver.org/28512.html http://tc.eserver.org/28512.html Tag cloud displays tags in a website which emphasize some of the tags by showing them with larger font sizes, and/or in darker colors. Moreover, tags in a tag cloud are usually arranged in alphabetical order. Tag cloud seems to work in the English world as a means of visualization as well as an extra means of navigation - what about in the Chinese world or more specifically, what about in Hong Kong? http://tc.eserver.org/27996.html http://tc.eserver.org/27996.html RDF was originally created in 1999 as a standard on top of XML for encoding metadata--literally, data about data. Metadata is, of course, things like who authored a web page, what date a blog entry was published, etc., information that is in some sense secondary to some other content already on the regular web. Since then, and perhaps especially after the updated RDF spec in 2004, the scope of RDF has really evolved into something greater. The most exciting uses of RDF aren't in encoding information about web resources, but information about and relations between things in the real world: people, places, concepts, etc. http://tc.eserver.org/27325.html http://tc.eserver.org/27325.html In this article, we are going to discuss a major problems involving keyword selection for existing businesses. It is a simple mistake, but one most people do not think about. The two prime Internet marketing platforms are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake. http://tc.eserver.org/27322.html http://tc.eserver.org/27322.html As you have probably heard over and over, keyword research is a pivotal step for success. Taken a step further, it can develop your product lines for you. http://tc.eserver.org/26792.html http://tc.eserver.org/26792.html Libraries must increasingly accommodate bibliographic records encoded with a variety of standards and emerging standards, including Dublin Core, MODS, and VRA Core. The problem is that many libraries still rely solely on MARC and AACR2. Meanwhile, the world of information is passing us by. How important is this problem? There are now literally millions of useful online items that lack MARC cataloging and will likely never be cataloged in MARC. We ignore these resources at our peril. Our users will justifiably seek assistance elsewhere, as many already have. Ignoring the problem will only make libraries increasingly marginalized. What are we to do? http://tc.eserver.org/26179.html http://tc.eserver.org/26179.html The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a hot topic among those who author, edit, deliver and manage content. But adopting a standard architecture is an important decision that requires up front research and knowledge of the pitfalls. Find out if DITA is right for your organization. Read this whitepaper to learn more (PDF). http://tc.eserver.org/26136.html http://tc.eserver.org/26136.html I have long wondered why government web sites all over the world tend to use metadata of several different types jumbled together and overlapping. For example, pages with two description metatags or two or three title tags are common. I suspect that most of the replication and confusion has developed for historical reasons. http://tc.eserver.org/25978.html http://tc.eserver.org/25978.html For all of its upside, XML-based single-source publishing has proven to be expensive and complicated to implement. XML-based single sourcing requires significant tool development, data conversion, and system integration prior to realizing the benefits of repurposing and reuse. To mitigate this, some vertical industries have developed their own XML tag sets. While successful on their own, these vertical industry efforts have not been extensible to other industries. A new XML-based approach to information development is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). http://tc.eserver.org/25705.html http://tc.eserver.org/25705.html Many classification systems suffer from an inflexible top-down approach, forcing users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. http://tc.eserver.org/25655.html http://tc.eserver.org/25655.html The Dublin Core is currently the best-developed candidate for a simple resource description model for electronic resources on the Web. It represents the results of a three year process of consensus-building through a series of focussed, invitational workshops involving librarians, digital library researchers, and various content specialists from many countries. http://tc.eserver.org/25494.html http://tc.eserver.org/25494.html The Semantic Web promises to provide new applications for Internet users through the use of RDF metadata attached to various information resources on the web. Yet issomewhat unclear who will provide the metadata, or what will motivate people to provideit, let alone the exact nature of the applications the Semantic Web will ultimately support. What will the ¡°killer app¡± of the Semantic Web be, and what shape will it take? http://tc.eserver.org/23599.html http://tc.eserver.org/23599.html DITA is an architecture for creating topicoriented, information-typed content that can be reused and single-sourced in a variety of ways. It is also an architecture for creating new information types and describing new information domains, allowing groups to create very specific, targeted document type definitions using a process called specialization, while at the same time reusing common output transforms and design rules. We discuss several methods that can be used to extend DITA’s basic topic types. http://tc.eserver.org/23254.html http://tc.eserver.org/23254.html L'articolo descrive il funzionamento della Classificazione Bibliografica Bliss, 2a edizione (BC2), sistema di classificazione interamente basato su uno schema a faccette, di cui Vanda Broughton è la curatrice insieme a Jack Mills. http://tc.eserver.org/23253.html http://tc.eserver.org/23253.html Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website, talks about the transition from being a consultant to an 'innie' IA, unravels the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies and shares her vision of the future of IA. http://tc.eserver.org/23200.html http://tc.eserver.org/23200.html La classificazione rappresenta un investimento che comporta dei costi nel breve termine, ma che dà anche notevoli frutti nel lungo termine (se impostata correttamente). Fra i sistemi di classificazione, quello a faccette (o multidimensionale) è sicuramente il più potente e versatile (nonostante gli schemi affermatisi come standard nella maggioranza delle biblioteche sono assai distanti da quello a faccette). http://tc.eserver.org/23192.html http://tc.eserver.org/23192.html This article addresses two aspects of classification: innovation and faceted classification. Includes links to additional online resources involving classification. http://tc.eserver.org/23198.html http://tc.eserver.org/23198.html L'articolo fornisce una introduzione al concetto di 'classificazione a faccette', descrivendo: i suoi vantaggi rispetto ai sistemi di classificazione gerarchici; esempi di applicazione al web; un esempio di applicazione alla classificazione dei formaggi. http://tc.eserver.org/23205.html http://tc.eserver.org/23205.html This study discusses the role of classification schemes in resource description and discovery. It recommends automatic classification processes if large robot-generated services are to offer a good browsing structure for their documents or advanced filtering techniques as well as proper query expansion tools to improve the search process. http://tc.eserver.org/23217.html http://tc.eserver.org/23217.html A tutorial on the basics of constructing an information retrieval thesaurus. It includes a glossary of thesaurus terms. http://tc.eserver.org/23097.html http://tc.eserver.org/23097.html This paper presents 'Distributed Active Relationships' (an extension of the Warwick Framework), a general framework for dealing with meta data issues in digital libraries and other information systems. By treating meta data as data, rather than giving it a special distinguished role, arbitrary resources are allowed to be associated with arbitrary relationships. http://tc.eserver.org/22394.html http://tc.eserver.org/22394.html This paper outlines the assumptions, process and results of a pilot study of issues of interoperability among a set of seven existing controlled vocabulary schemes that make statements about the audience of an educational resource. http://tc.eserver.org/22395.html http://tc.eserver.org/22395.html Knowledge management in digital libraries is a universal problem. Keyword-based searching is applied everywhere no matter whether the resources are indexed databases or full-text Web pages. In keyword matching, the valuable content description and indexing of the metadata, such as the subject descriptors and the classification notations, are merely treated as common keywords to be matched with the user query. Without the support of vocabulary control tools, such as classification systems and thesauri, the intelligent labor of content analysis, description and indexing in metadata production are seriously wasted. http://tc.eserver.org/22393.html http://tc.eserver.org/22393.html Metadata generation is the act of creating or producing metadata. Generating good quality metadata in an efficient manner is essential for organizing and making accessible the growing number of rich resources available on the Web. The success of digital libraries, the sustenance of interoperability – as promoted by the Open Archives Initiative – and the evolution of Semantic Web all rely on efficient metadata generation. This article sketches a metadata generation framework that involves processes, people and tools. It also presents selected research initiatives and highlights the goals of the Metadata Generation Research Project. http://tc.eserver.org/22392.html http://tc.eserver.org/22392.html Metadata has taken on a new look with the advent of XML and digital resources. XML provides a new versatile structure for tagging and packaging metadata as the rapid proliferation of digital resources demands both rapidly produced descriptive data and the encoding of more types of metadata. Two emerging standards are attempting to harness these developments for library needs. The first is the Metadata Object and Description Schema (MODS), a MARC-compatible XML schema for encoding descriptive data. The second standard is the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), a highly flexible XML schema for packaging the descriptive metadata and various other important types of metadata needed to assure the use and preservation of digital resources. http://tc.eserver.org/21599.html http://tc.eserver.org/21599.html This is a general collection of my Semantic Web hackings, often using CWM and the Notation3 (N3) format. http://tc.eserver.org/21597.html http://tc.eserver.org/21597.html The Semantic Web is a conceptual information space in which the resources identified by URIs can be processed by machines. It operates on the principles of 'partial understanding' and 'inference' (being able to infer new knowledge of terms from data that you already understand), and hence evolution and transformation. Because the URIs are being used to represent the resources, systems can grow on a globally decentralized basis, similar to hypertext documentation systems on the early WWW. http://tc.eserver.org/21603.html http://tc.eserver.org/21603.html Hace casi tres años comentábamos que la promesa de la web semántica era convertir la red en 'un espacio auto-navegable y auto-comprensible.' ¿Dónde estamos hoy en día?. http://tc.eserver.org/21499.html http://tc.eserver.org/21499.html In the domain of aerospace/defense, a products life cycle may likely span up to 30 years. The amount of technical data required to manufacture, operate, and maintain those products is immense. The graphic representation of that data facilitates the communication of operational and maintenance instructions. This paper outlines issues with creating, authoring, revising, and delivering intelligence with graphics and the associated meta-data. http://tc.eserver.org/21249.html http://tc.eserver.org/21249.html What is Dublin Core? And why would you need a whole conference about it? The end of September and beginning of October brought representatives from various countries around the world to a sunny and warm Seattle, Washington, host of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference. http://tc.eserver.org/21003.html http://tc.eserver.org/21003.html This document is not intended to teach you RDF via my own words, but rather to hand-hold you through the 'good' parts of the same journey I took. If it looks like a big link-list with menial comments from the peanut gallery, then you're not far off the mark of my intent. This is by no means definitive, nor was that the goal. http://tc.eserver.org/21002.html http://tc.eserver.org/21002.html This document is designed as being a simple but comprehensive introductory publication for anybody trying to get into the Semantic Web: from beginners through to long time hackers. Recommended pre-reading: the Semantic Web in Breadth. http://tc.eserver.org/21001.html http://tc.eserver.org/21001.html This piece speaks about the different parts of the Semantic Web and how they fit together. http://tc.eserver.org/20897.html http://tc.eserver.org/20897.html 'There is a singular lack of vocabulary control in the field of controlled vocabularies,' Bella Hass Weinberg, professor of library science at St. John's University in New York, is fond of saying. To help you cut through the maze of verbiage often found in this field, we have created a glossary of terms. http://tc.eserver.org/20736.html http://tc.eserver.org/20736.html The 2002 Dublin Core annual conference and workshop marked the beginning of a new effort by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to involve members of the corporate world in the evolution and application of the Dublin Core standard. The first meetings of two DCMI Circles of Interest were held on Monday, October 14, 2002, followed the next day by a panel session with several members of the Circles presenting their initial observations and conclusions to the wider conference. http://tc.eserver.org/20390.html http://tc.eserver.org/20390.html Proposes the design of an XML-based type library format. If you've had exposure to Microsoft COM or Mozilla's XPCOM, you're probably familiar with their binary TLB (MS) and XDT (Mozilla) formats that define the available operations and interfaces for a package of portable components. An interpreted language such as JavaScript can use these definitions as cheat sheets to find out what operations and parameters are available to call on-the-fly. http://tc.eserver.org/18734.html http://tc.eserver.org/18734.html Los metadatos son información relativa a otra información. Al definir un grupo de metadatos para un objeto dado, estamos describiendo el objeto en cuestión, lo estamos caracterizando. Por ejemplo, HTML permite definir metadatos para una página web a través de su etiqueta <meta>. Esos metadatos (author, keywords...) caracterizan la página, describen su contenido. Los metadatos, utilizados tradicionalmente en el entorno bibliotecario, están resultando de gran utilidad en la Web, tanto en Sistemas de Recuperación de Información (back-end) como en Sistemas de Navegación (front-end). http://tc.eserver.org/18309.html http://tc.eserver.org/18309.html This article provides an overview of work completed at Tsinghua University Library in which a metadata framework was developed to aid in the preservation of digital resources. The metadata framework is used for the creation of metadata to describe resources, and includes an encoding standard used to store metadata and resource structures in information systems. The author points out that the Tsinghua University Library metadata framework provides a successful digital preservation solution that may be an appropriate solution for other organizations as well.