Building a Metadata-Based Website

The online world has been flooded in recent years with talk of metadata, structured authoring, and cascading style sheets. The idea of a semantic web is gaining momentum. At the confluence of these two broad categories of activity, new models of websites are emerging.

Lider, Brett and Anca Mosoiu. Boxes and Arrows (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

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 contextualize content. After a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata, this article focuses on finding and utilizing such relationships in hierarchies.

Ricci, Christian. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

An Evaluation of Document Keyphrase Sets  

Keywords and keyphrases have many useful roles as document surrogates and descriptors, but the manual production of keyphrase metadata for large digital library collections is at best expensive and time-consuming, and at worst logistically impossible. Algorithms for keyphrase extraction like Kea and Extractor produce a set of phrases that are associated with a document. Though these sets are often utilized as a group, keyphrase extraction is usually evaluated by measuring the quality of individual keyphrases. This paper reports an assessment that asks human assessors to rate entire sets of keyphrases produced by Kea, Extractor and document authors. The results provide further evidence that human assessors rate all three sources highly (with some caveats), but show that the relationship between the quality of the phrases in a set and the set as a whole is not always simple. Choosing the best individual phrases will not necessarily produce the best set; combinations of lesser phrases may result in better overall quality.

Jones, Steve and Gordon W. Paynter. Journal of Digital Information (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Extracting Value from Automated Classification Tools: the Role of Manual Involvement and Controlled Vocabularies

Automated classification tools can't solve today's large-scale web and intranet indexing challenges alone. Neither can humans. But solutions that integrate human expertise with software products such as Interwoven's Metatagger and Autonomy's Categorizer can provide real value and savings. After a brief introduction to automated classification, this white paper discusses the benefits and limitations of manual, automated, and hybrid approaches. It explores the opportunities for leveraging controlled vocabularies and thesauri to produce more effective indexing solutions.

Hagedorn, Kat. DLib Magazine (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

FacetMap

FacetMap is both a data model and a software package, created to let users browse complex metadata while retaining a simple, familiar, menu interface.

FacetMap (2003). Design>Information Design>Metadata>Web Design

A Metadata Framework Developed at the Tsinghua University Library to Aid in the Preservation of Digital Resources

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.

Niu, Jinfang. D-Lib Magazine (2002). Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Metadata

Semantic Web Hints And Tips

It is important that on the Semantic Web, people produce data that is clean and interoperable. Some RDF techniques can currently only be learned through the RDF community, through hours of research, or through implementation experience, so this is an attempt to gather some useful but quick hints and tips into one place.

Palmer, Sean B. InfoMesh (2001). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

The Semantic Web, Taking Form

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.

Palmer, Sean B. InfoMesh (2001). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Towards a Core Ontology for Information Integration  

In this paper, we argue that a core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e. metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, browsing, data mining and knowledge extraction. This paper describes the results of a series of three workshops held in 2001 and 2002 which brought together representatives from the cultural heritage and digital library communities with the goal of harmonizing their knowledge perspectives and producing a core ontology. The knowledge perspectives of these two communities were represented by the CIDOC/CRM, an ontology for information exchange in the cultural heritage and museum community, and the ABC ontology, a model for the exchange and integration of digital library information. This paper describes the mediation process between these two different knowledge biases and the results of this mediation - the harmonization of the ABC and CIDOC/CRM ontologies, which we believe may provide a useful basis for information integration in the wider scope of the involved communities.

Doerr, Martin, Jane Hunter and Carl Lagoze. Journal of Digital information (2003). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Two Kinds of Keywords

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.

McAlpine, Rachel. Quality Web Content (2005). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Unraveling the Mysteries of Metadata and Taxonomies

Recently Boxes and Arrows caught up with Samantha Bailey, formerly at Argus and current lead IA for Wachovia Corporation's Wachovia.com website. She 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.

Wodtke, Christina. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

La Web Semántica, Hoy

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?.

Dursteler, Juan Carlos. InfoVis (2003). (Spanish) Articles>Information Design>Web Design>Metadata

Western States Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices

This document of best practices offers assistance in creating metadata records for digitized resources using the Dublin Core element data set.

Colorado Digitization Program (2000). Design>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata