#32924
Affinity Diagramming is a very simple but powerful technique for grouping and understanding information. In particular, affinity diagramming provides a good way to identify and analyze issues. There are several variations of the technique.
Information and Design (2006). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Charts and Graphs
#33018
Thus "metadata" means "data that deal with other data," or "data that deal with original data,"or casually but briefly, "data about data." Within the library- and information-science (LIS) community, the most frequent use of "metadata" is to refer to data produced as part of the process of cataloging of materials in libraries and other information agencies.
Wyllys, R.E. University of Texas (2000). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33019
Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called data about data or information about information.
National Information Standards Organization (2004). Books>Information Design>Metadata
#33022
As long as people have been collecting information together, be it in the form of a library, an institutional filing system, a collection of accounting records or whatever, they've needed to come up with ways to help them know how to properly file and retrieve documents. These systems needn't involve any high technology.
Lucas, Marty. Mappa Mundi (1999). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33023
Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy
In content metadata and hierarchies, you will often find a goldmine of implicit and explicit data that you can leverage to creatively contextualise content. After a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata, this article focuses on finding and utilising such relationships in hierarchies.
Ricci, Christian. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33024
Faceted Metadata Search and Browse
Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources. This can be a single set of hierarchical subject labels, such as a Yahoo or Open Directory Project category. More often, the metadata has several facets: attributes in various orthogonal sets of categories. This is often stored in database record fields and tables, especially for product catalogs.
SearchTools.com (2007). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33025
Folksonomies Plus Controlled Vocabularies
We need a word for the class of comparisons that assumes that the status quo is cost-free, so that all new work, when it can be shown to have disadvantages to the status quo, is also assumed to be inferior to the status quo.
Shirky, Clay. Corante (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary
#33026
Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?
Folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals.
Rosenfeld, Louis. Louis Rosenfeld (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Social Networking
#33027
It's Time To Get Serious About Metadata
When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metadata.
McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#33029
Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia
Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.
Doctorow, Cory. Well.com (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33030
The 2003 Dublin Core Conference took as its basic premise that "Metadata is fundamental to persons, organizations, machines, and an array of enterprises that are increasingly turning to the Web and electronic communication for disseminating and accessing information." One of the reasons metadata is receiving such attention is its role in facilitating information seeking.
Crystal, Abe and Paula Land. Dublin Core (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Search
#33031
Metadata and XML: Improving the Findability of Information 
Information about objects on subjects - metadata describes objects. Purposes: Information management and discovery. Metadata enables content to be retreived, tracked, and assembled automatically.
Bogaards, Peter J. Tekom (2004). Presentations>Information Design>Metadata>XML
#33034
Metadata on the Web: On the Integration of RDF and Topic Maps
Meta-information provides an additional layer of abstraction on web documents that can be used for sophisticated applications relying on the precise semantic characterization of their content. Two leading standards, RDF and Topic Maps, compete as the model through which expressing metadata. These two models are sufficiently different as to make back and forth conversion a difficult and imprecise task. In this paper, we introduce META, a set of integrated tools helping in editing, navigating and converting metadata expressed in either language.
Ciancarini, Paolo, Riccardo Gentilucci, Marco Pirruccio, Valentina Presutti and Fabio Vitali. Extreme Markup Languages (2003). Articles>Information Design>Sitemaps>Metadata
#33036
Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!
Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address.
Garshol, Lars Marius. Ontopia (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Sitemaps
#33037
Social Consequences of Social Tagging
Too many of the paeans to tagging that I’ve read have completely ignored some of the key social and cultural issues associated with public and collaborative labeling of content, opting instead for a level of technology-driven optimism that I see as overly naive.
Lawley, Liz. Corante (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Social Networking
#33040
In an attempt to summarize the relationship among various metadata formats and how they relate to building Internet systems I wrote a glossary. I then ordered and tied the terms together with a bit of narrative to explain the relationships among the terms.
Lombardi, Victor. Noise Between Stations (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Glossary
#33041
Metadata: The Art of Adding Signposts 
Why do we add metadata? To find information back. To investigate the source. To see what is related. To have an overview AND see what is relevant.
Dey Alexander (2004). Presentations>Information Design>Metadata
#33188
Tomatoes Are Not the Only Fruit: A Guide to Controlled Vocabularies
This is a brief introduction to the relationships between taxonomies, thesauri and ontologies, and similar ‘things’. It doesn’t contain definitive, scientific definitions, it is a personal interpretation of some fairly complex structures. It aims to give you a fairly clear what these ‘things’ are, so librarians or IT people can’t blind you with science.
#33189
Converting a Controlled Vocabulary Into an Ontology: The Case of GEM 
The prevalance of digital information raised issues regarding the suitability of conventional library tools for organizing information. The multi-dimensionality of digital resources requires a more versatile and flexible representation to accommodate intelligent information representation and retrieval. Ontologies are used as a solution to such issues in many application domains, mainly due to their ability explicitly to specify the semantics and relations and to express them in a computer understandable language. Conventional knowledge organization tools such as classifications and thesauri resemble ontologies in a way that they define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner, but they are less expressive than ontologies when it comes to machine language. This paper used the controlled vocabulary at the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) as an example to address the issues in representing digital resources. The theoretical and methodological framework in this paper serves as the rationale and guideline for converting the GEM controlled vocabulary into an ontology. Compared to the original semantic model of GEM controlled vocabulary, the major difference between the two models lies in the values added through deeper semantics in describing digital objects, both conceptually and relationally.
Qin, Jian and Stephen Paling. Information Research (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary
#33190
Publications on Thesaurus Construction and Use
This is a list of printed and electronic publications about the principles of constructing and using information retrieval thesauri. It is not a list of existing thesauri, although some thesauri have been included when they are good examples or illustrate the results of different approaches to thesaurus construction.
Willpower Information (2008). Resources>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary
#33239
Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. For example, some users shopping for jewelry may be most interested in browsing by particular type of jewelry (earrings, necklaces), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular material (gold, silver). “Material” and “type” are examples of facets; earrings, necklaces, gold, silver are examples of facet values.
Adkisson, Heidi P. Web Design Practices (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#33240
Taxonomies and Thesauri may relate terms in a controlled vocabulary via parent-child and associative relationships, but do not contain explicit grammar rules to constrain how to use controlled vocabulary terms to express (model) something meaningful within a domain of interest. A meta-model is an ontology used by modelers. People make commitments to use a specific controlled vocabulary or ontology for a domain of interest.
Pidcock, Woody. Metamodel.com (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33241
A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis
Classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) attempt to enumerate topics expressed in published works. Such enumerative systems do not allow easily for the combination of terms from different parts of the classification schedules to express compound subjects.
Spiteri, Louise. Information Architecture Institute (1998). Articles>Information Design>Metadata
#33273
Taxonomy and Metadata Strategies for Effective Content Management
There is a lot of mumbo-jumbo like the word "taxonomy" that is being thrown around to describe how to manage so-called unstructured content like business documents, web site pages, and old fashioned technical reports and articles. On the one hand, we want to remember what we already know about how to create a useful core catalog record to describe a content object so it can be found again later when needed. On the other hand, there are some bad habits and obsolete ideas like inverted file indexes that we need to get beyond. This talk is about what we have seen in dozens of applied information management projects over the past few years, and how you can take advantage of what you already know to solve big problems like these in your own organizations.
Busch, Joseph. ASIST (2004). Articles>Content Management>Information Design>Metadata
#33796
XML Transformation and Metadata Repositories Enable Information Integration
Among the popular emerging integration needs in the market today is information aggregation, normalization, and presentation from multiple back-end data sources to front-end applications. Termed Enterprise Information Integration by some vendors in the market, this type of solution relies on a centralized common object model to provide a data access interface to client applications. Applications can used this common interface to request data from one or more data sources in a single query, with the intricate details of resolving the query left to the integration tool. This session will explain the architecture of an enterprise information integration solution in general, highlight some of the vendors and their approaches in this market space, and explain the use of such as solution through a real-world example with a large financial services organization.
Gantz, Stephen. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
