http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Metadata A listing of the most recently indexed works about 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/Metadata http://tc.eserver.org/34664.html http://tc.eserver.org/34664.html The web is designed to be consumed by humans, and much of the rich, useful information our websites contain, is inaccessible to machines. People can cope with all sorts of variations in layout, spelling, capitalization, color, position, and so on, and still absorb the intended meaning from the page. Machines, on the other hand, need some help. A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it. http://tc.eserver.org/34542.html http://tc.eserver.org/34542.html Metadata has become in past few years the key element in the world of intellectual property creation and management. Most digital asset and content management system vendors now define their product by its ability to support custom metadata and in particulary Adobe’s XMP metadata technology. Besides being an excellent organizational tool, metadata is the essence of advertising, packaging and medical/financial/governmental record keeping and more. Every time we complete a form, we do so with metadata values in the form fields. Our Internet searches start with metadata keywords and end with information wrapped around and associated with those keywords. http://tc.eserver.org/34183.html http://tc.eserver.org/34183.html In this paper, we present a novel method for the classification of Web sites. This method exploits both structure and content of Web sites in order to discern their functionality. It allows for distinguishing between eight of the most relevant functional classes of Web sites. We show that a pre-classification of Web sites utilizing structural properties considerably improves a subsequent textual classification with standard techniques. We evaluate this approach on a dataset comprising more than 16,000 Web sites with about 20 million crawled and 100 million known Web pages. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 92% for the coarse-grained classification of these Web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/33847.html http://tc.eserver.org/33847.html Enterprise metadata appears in many languages and formats. XML provides a standard and consistent language for metadata, simplifying both interchange and parsing. But simply storing metadata as an XML file (be it XSD, BPEL, WSDL, J2EE EJB descriptors files, or any of dozens of proprietary formats) does not automatically and formally capture the full richness of the given metadata language. Even if XSDs are used to constrain syntax, they cannot define all possible structures and relationships, nor can they express the meaning of metadata in its business context. http://tc.eserver.org/33796.html http://tc.eserver.org/33796.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33800.html http://tc.eserver.org/33800.html This talk describes a new approach to rapid application development using patterns, frameworks and modeling languages based on XML. It explains why earlier model driven paradigms failed, and shares insights from commercial tool development experiences. Then, it shows how models based on XML are being used to automate large parts of the software development life cycle. http://tc.eserver.org/33801.html http://tc.eserver.org/33801.html The Atom API is an emerging interface for editing content. The interface is RESTful and uses XML and HTTP to define an editing scheme that's easy to implement and extend. History, basic operation, and applications to areas outside weblogs will be covered. http://tc.eserver.org/33762.html http://tc.eserver.org/33762.html Using new tools, RDF can be used for knowledge management, maintaining all the data’s relations, automatically building tables for RDBMS deployment, and supporting graphical navigation, multiple navigation trees, and linking across diverse content sets. http://tc.eserver.org/33775.html http://tc.eserver.org/33775.html The concept of thumbnails is common in image representation. A thumbnail is a highly compressed version of an image that provides a small, yet complete visual representation to the human eye. We propose the adaptation of the concept of thumbnails to the domain of documents, whereby a thumbnail of any document can be generated from its semantic content, providing an adequate amount of information about the documents. However, unlike image thumbnails, document thumbnails are mainly for the consumption of software such as search engines, and other content processing systems. With the advent of the semantic web, the requirement for machine processing of documents has become extremely important. We give particular attention to electronic documents in XML and in RDF/XML, with a view towards the processing of documents in the semantic web. http://tc.eserver.org/33404.html http://tc.eserver.org/33404.html One of the critical-mass elements for location-based services to actually be useful is for online content to have a sense of geographic context. We're already seeing it to some extent with services such as Flickr allowing photographs to be tagged with GPS coordinates: camera-phones with built-in GPS can automatically tag each photo with the exact location at which it was taken, and that meta-data can then be used to search for photos of a particular area or place. http://tc.eserver.org/33273.html http://tc.eserver.org/33273.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33236.html http://tc.eserver.org/33236.html Which would be easier to remember: one thousand individual terms or three facets of ten terms each? http://tc.eserver.org/33237.html http://tc.eserver.org/33237.html Discover what "faceted browsing" is and other Web-focused terms for old ideas. http://tc.eserver.org/33238.html http://tc.eserver.org/33238.html This is a classified, annotated bibliography about how to design faceted classification systems and make them usable on the World Wide Web. http://tc.eserver.org/33239.html http://tc.eserver.org/33239.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33240.html http://tc.eserver.org/33240.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33241.html http://tc.eserver.org/33241.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33242.html http://tc.eserver.org/33242.html The purpose of this 1995 paper is to define what is meant by facet analysis, and to review briefly the history of facet analysis within the context of other types of subject analysis in libraries and within the context of information retrieval research. http://tc.eserver.org/33188.html http://tc.eserver.org/33188.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33189.html http://tc.eserver.org/33189.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33190.html http://tc.eserver.org/33190.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33018.html http://tc.eserver.org/33018.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33019.html http://tc.eserver.org/33019.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33020.html http://tc.eserver.org/33020.html With Flickr and del.icio.us, social networking goes beyond sharing contacts and connections. http://tc.eserver.org/33021.html http://tc.eserver.org/33021.html The value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead. Like Andrew, I say good riddance! http://tc.eserver.org/33022.html http://tc.eserver.org/33022.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33023.html http://tc.eserver.org/33023.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33024.html http://tc.eserver.org/33024.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33025.html http://tc.eserver.org/33025.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33026.html http://tc.eserver.org/33026.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33027.html http://tc.eserver.org/33027.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33029.html http://tc.eserver.org/33029.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33030.html http://tc.eserver.org/33030.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33031.html http://tc.eserver.org/33031.html Information about objects on subjects - metadata describes objects. Purposes: Information management and discovery. Metadata enables content to be retreived, tracked, and assembled automatically. http://tc.eserver.org/33032.html http://tc.eserver.org/33032.html Metadata is one of the most misunderstood aspects of content management and website design. Editors and writers tend to look at it as a technical issue. Technical people look for a software solution. Both are wrong. Metadata is a fundamental skill that web writers and editors must acquire. http://tc.eserver.org/33033.html http://tc.eserver.org/33033.html Creating great metadata for your content begins with understanding who your reader is. What is the metadata they look for when they read a page of your content? What are the type of words they use when they search for your content? When scanning your classification, what are the "trigger words" that will make them want to go deeper into your website? http://tc.eserver.org/33034.html http://tc.eserver.org/33034.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html http://tc.eserver.org/33035.html The shift in how search engines treat keywords is significant. They tend to ignore the keyword metatag and rather look for keywords in the actual page content. This means that you need to figure out your keywords before you write any content. Then, you include them throughout your content, particularly in headings and summaries. http://tc.eserver.org/33036.html http://tc.eserver.org/33036.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33037.html http://tc.eserver.org/33037.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33040.html http://tc.eserver.org/33040.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/33041.html http://tc.eserver.org/33041.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/32921.html http://tc.eserver.org/32921.html I’ve been thinking about one particular artifact of the folksonomy phenomenon — the folksonomy menu that serves as a sort of buzz index providing users with a quick visualization of the most popular tags (technically I think it’s called a weighted list). Popular tags are displayed in a larger font and it’s relatively easy to identify hot topics at a glance. This visual representation of the popularity of any given tag is undeniably cool. However, once the coolness factor wears off it becomes fairly obvious that these menus are also not very accessible. http://tc.eserver.org/32922.html http://tc.eserver.org/32922.html The affinity diagram, or KJ method (after its author, Kawakita Jiro), wasn't originally intended for quality management. Nonetheless, it has become one of the most widely used of the Japanese management and planning tools. The affinity diagram was developed to discovering meaningful groups of ideas within a raw list. In doing so, it is important to let the groupings emerge naturally, using the right side of the brain, rather than according to preordained categories. http://tc.eserver.org/32924.html http://tc.eserver.org/32924.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/32525.html http://tc.eserver.org/32525.html Using a bit of JavaScript, a nifty way of making remote web service calls (JSONP) and a few microformats, I can display information from one service somewhere else, leaving me with only one place to update it. In this article you're going to create a JavaScript badge that can be added to any site and which will display relationship data from a service which exposes it http://tc.eserver.org/32530.html http://tc.eserver.org/32530.html So you have heard about microformats, read the introductory articles, and even bought the book. But now you are probably thinking "great - I have done my part to make the web a better place by adding microformats; what's next? What can people do with my data besides add it to their address book or calendar?" The intent of this article is to get you to think about microformats in different ways, and to demonstrate some interesting visualizations and mash-ups of microformatted content. http://tc.eserver.org/32531.html http://tc.eserver.org/32531.html In this article, we'll look at ways that you can geocode your content, using data formats such as the location nanoformat, GPX and combinations of geocoded microformats in HTML. http://tc.eserver.org/32464.html http://tc.eserver.org/32464.html This article deals with a part of the HTML document that does not get the attention it deserves: the markup that goes inside the head element. By the end of this tutorial you’ll have learnt about the different parts of this section and what they all do, including the doctype, title element, keywords and description (which are handled by meta elements). http://tc.eserver.org/32465.html http://tc.eserver.org/32465.html In this article I will look at the doctype in a lot more detail, showing what it does and how it helps you validate your HTML, how to choose a doctype for your document, and the XML declaration, which you’ll rarely need, but will sometimes come across. http://tc.eserver.org/32295.html http://tc.eserver.org/32295.html With the overall purpose of improving the information literacy skills of librarianship and information science students, an academic portal specifically centred on abstracts and abstracting resources is proposed. We take the existing literature, together with our knowledge and experience of abstract/abstracting topics and web-based technologies to conceive the research design. The research mainly consists of the selection, assessment and web-display of the most relevant abstracts on knowledge management, information representation, natural language processing, abstract/abstracting, modelling the scientific document, information retrieval and information evaluation. The resulting Cyberabstracts portal presents its products consistently and includes reference, abstract, keywords, assessment and access to the full document. Improvement opportunities for this unique subject-based gateway, representing much more than a mere subject catalogue, are uncovered as the starting point on a planned route towards excellence. http://tc.eserver.org/32320.html http://tc.eserver.org/32320.html In this research, the development of a 'concept-clumping algorithm' designed to improve the clustering of technical concepts is demonstrated. The algorithm developed first identifies a list of technically relevant noun phrases from a cleaned extracted list and then applies a rule-based algorithm for identifying synonymous terms based on shared words in each term. An assessment of the algorithm found that the algorithm has an 89-91% precision rate, was successful in moving technically important terms higher in the term frequency list, and improved the technical specificity of term clusters. http://tc.eserver.org/32325.html http://tc.eserver.org/32325.html Mining association rules from large databases of business data is an important topic in data mining. In many applications, there are explicit or implicit taxonomies (hierarchies) for items, so it may be useful to find associations at levels of the taxonomy other than the primitive concept level. Previous work on the mining of generalized association rules, however, assumed that the taxonomy of items remained unchanged, disregarding the fact that the taxonomy might be updated as new transactions are added to the database over time. If this happens, effectively updating the generalized association rules to reflect the database change and related taxonomy evolution is a crucial task. In this paper, we examine this problem and propose two novel algorithms, called IDTE and IDTE2, which can incrementally update the generalized association rules when the taxonomy of items evolves as a result of new transactions. Empirical evaluations show that our algorithms can maintain their performance even for large numbers of incremental transactions and high degrees of taxonomy evolution, and are faster than applying contemporary generalized association mining algorithms to the whole updated database. http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html This study investigated use of collaborative recommendations in web searching. An experimental system was designed. In the experimental system, recommendations were generated in a group report format, including items judged relevant by previous users, search queries and the URLs of documents. The study explored how users used these items, the effects of their use, and what factors contributed to this use. The results demonstrate that users preferred using queries and document sources (URLs), rather than relevance judgment (document ratings). The findings also show that using recommended items had a significant effect on the number of documents viewed, but not on precision or number of queries. Task difficulty and search skills had significant impact on the use. Possible reasons for the results are analyzed. Implications and future directions are discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/32330.html http://tc.eserver.org/32330.html This paper describes a new concept-based multi-document summarization system that employs discourse parsing, information extraction and information integration. Dissertation abstracts in the field of sociology were selected as sample documents for this study. The summarization process includes four major steps — (1) parsing dissertation abstracts into five standard sections; (2) extracting research concepts (often operationalized as research variables) and their relationships, the research methods used and the contextual relations from specific sections of the text; (3) integrating similar concepts and relationships across different abstracts; and (4) combining and organizing the different kinds of information using a variable-based framework, and presenting them in an interactive web-based interface. The accuracy of each summarization step was evaluated by comparing the system-generated output against human coding. The user evaluation carried out in the study indicated that the majority of subjects (70%) preferred the concept-based summaries generated using the system to the sentence-based summaries generated using traditional sentence extraction techniques. http://tc.eserver.org/32276.html http://tc.eserver.org/32276.html The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset. http://tc.eserver.org/32234.html http://tc.eserver.org/32234.html A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user. 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/31510.html http://tc.eserver.org/31510.html Little things mean a lot. Especially online. Microcontent—or the headlines, decks, subheads and other 'small' pieces of web copy—actually do most of the communicating on your web site. Handled poorly, microcontent can confuse and frustrate web visitors. Here's how to write microcontent to communicate to—instead of discombobulate—your readers. 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/29125.html http://tc.eserver.org/29125.html This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas--sentence structure and reader comprehension--and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles. 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/28145.html http://tc.eserver.org/28145.html I am quite surprised by what I have learned about the effectiveness of product names as organic search keywords. 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/27721.html http://tc.eserver.org/27721.html A controlled vocabulary makes a database easier to search. Since we have many different ways of describing concepts, drawing all of these terms together under a single word or phrase in a database makes searching the database more efficient as it eliminates guess work. However, arriving at this efficiency requires consistency on the part of the individual indexing the database and the use of pre-determined terms. http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html http://tc.eserver.org/27519.html The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. 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/27022.html http://tc.eserver.org/27022.html I've been thinking a lot about metadata recently, but not from the standpoint of XML or programming or helping to organize and index data. My interest is in the future of content ownership, delivery, and value. I see a future for media that looks very different from the media of today. The germ of this idea actually came from my experiences with online movie rentals. 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/26484.html http://tc.eserver.org/26484.html If you’ve been working with keyword optimization for a while, you know there are times when some great keywords drive tons of traffic to your site, but the resulting conversion rate is terrible. http://tc.eserver.org/26268.html http://tc.eserver.org/26268.html An information worksheet for designers developing metadata schemas for web design projects. http://tc.eserver.org/26180.html http://tc.eserver.org/26180.html If you need to learn more about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), look no further. Links to a few of the most useful DITA resources available on the web today. 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/23952.html http://tc.eserver.org/23952.html Plusieurs éléments 'méta', c'est-à-dire ne faisant pas directement partie du corps de votre texte, ont néanmoins une importance tout à fait particulière dans le référencement de votre site. Ces éléments sont, en effet, pris en compte en priorité par les moteurs de recherche, lesquels sont responsables d'une bonne partie de votre fréquentation. http://tc.eserver.org/23888.html http://tc.eserver.org/23888.html The authors present a new method of image searching based on conceptual descriptors. This method differs from the traditional methods of image searching that are based on keywords and visual similarity. http://tc.eserver.org/23895.html http://tc.eserver.org/23895.html This document of best practices offers assistance in creating metadata records for digitized resources using the Dublin Core element data set. http://tc.eserver.org/23819.html http://tc.eserver.org/23819.html Discusses Christopher Alexander's theories about a group of related design patterns, referred to as a 'pattern language.' 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/23202.html http://tc.eserver.org/23202.html The integration of taxonomy, classification, and search is covered in this article. The author reviews several possible software solutions. 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/23115.html http://tc.eserver.org/23115.html 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. 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/23098.html http://tc.eserver.org/23098.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/22747.html http://tc.eserver.org/22747.html The Semantic Web really is an attempt to reconceptualize and reengineer AI for the Web. Discusses the path forward for successfully selling and developing Semantic Web technology into industry. http://tc.eserver.org/22701.html http://tc.eserver.org/22701.html PRISM is an extensible XML metadata standard for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and multi-purposing content from magazines, news, catalogs, books and mainstream journals. http://tc.eserver.org/22562.html http://tc.eserver.org/22562.html The keyword selection process is not a short task. It takes an intimate knowledge of your market. In fact, choosing the right or wrong keywords could be the difference between your site being found by the search engines or remaining forever in search engine oblivion. 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/22152.html http://tc.eserver.org/22152.html The information model is a framework for organizing all the information people need. http://tc.eserver.org/21618.html http://tc.eserver.org/21618.html XML is displacing the traditional 'web page'--generally a static document, created with HTML. Most traditional web pages offer only slim interactivity and rely on an overworked server and CGI script. XML is promoting the concept of a 'weblication' (web application) that can work wonders on the web client without generating so much Internet traffic. http://tc.eserver.org/21626.html http://tc.eserver.org/21626.html XML syntax is just the foundation for data interoperability. The next step is semantic transparency. Some groups are working to address this by defining entire document formats to be adopted wholesale, while other groups are working on ways to express common terminology and concepts at a more granular level. In this installment, Uche Ogbuji looks at XML Topic Maps Published Subjects and Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF), two ideas that take the granular approach by seeking to provide anchors in the semantic stream. 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/21286.html http://tc.eserver.org/21286.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21278.html http://tc.eserver.org/21278.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21281.html http://tc.eserver.org/21281.html Once upon a time, we were curious and everything we encountered was new. We were excited about discovering new things and the world offered unlimited possibilities. Then we went to school and were taught to color inside the lines, that everything had its place and the world was ordered. http://tc.eserver.org/21280.html http://tc.eserver.org/21280.html You have probably heard information architects discussing the benefits of their latest taxonomy project and how you should be implementing one. But how, you might wonder, can you get started? In the next installment about Controlled Vocabularies, our authors go into detail about one methodology. 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/21202.html http://tc.eserver.org/21202.html Defining Meta Tags is much easier than explaining how they are used, and by which engines. http://tc.eserver.org/21184.html http://tc.eserver.org/21184.html Discusses some different ways of describing your document structure so that both computers and humans know what you mean. 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/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/20944.html http://tc.eserver.org/20944.html With the adoption of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) on the rise, researchers in academia and industry are seeking to leverage the descriptive power of metadata to better understand the semantic structure of information (e.g., see Berners-Lee, 1998). But most interaction on the World Wide Web is what Geisler (2001) calls “document-centered,” involving the exchange of discourse a great deal larger and more complex than the basic units of meaning that semantics deals effectively with. As a result, the tools of semantics fall short of providing adequate metadata schemes which capture the most compelling features of effective discourse in any medium: emotional and ethical appeals which work in conjunction with appropriate logical and semantic structures. 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.