Metadata is "data about data," of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels, for example a database schema. Metadata is used to facilitate the understanding, characteristics, and management usage of data.
#32276
The Folksonomy Tag Cloud: When is it Useful? 
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.
Sinclair, James and Michael Cardew-Hall. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata
#32295
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.
Pinto, Maria. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Information Design>Databases>Metadata
#32320
Identifying Synonymous Concepts in Preparation for Technology Mining 
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.
Courseault Trumbach, Cherie. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Knowledge Management>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary
#32325
Incremental Maintenance of Generalized Association Rules Under Taxonomy Evolution
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.
Tseng, Ming-Cheng, Wen-Yang Lin and Rong Jeng. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary
#32327
Use of Collaborative Recommendations for Web Search: An Exploratory User Study
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.
Zhang, Xiangmin and Yuelin Li. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search>Metadata
#32330
Design and Development of a Concept-Based Multi-Document Summarization System for Research Abstracts
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.
Ou, Shiyan, Christopher Soo-Guan and Dion H. Goh. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Information Design>Assessment>Metadata
#32464
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).
Heilmann, Christian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata
#32465
Choosing the Right Doctype for Your HTML Documents
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.
Johansson, Roger. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>HTML>Metadata
#32525
JavaScript Badges Powered by JSONP and Microformats
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
Rushgrove, Gareth. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>JavaScript
#32530
Microformat Encoding and Visualization
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.
Suda, Brian. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>XML>Metadata
#32531
Location-Based Publishing and Services
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.
Rose, Premasagar. Opera (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Geography
#32921
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.
alt tags (2005). Articles>Web Design>Accessibility>Metadata
#32922
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.
SkyMark (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Charts and Graphs
#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
#33020
Collaborative Knowledge Gardening
With Flickr and del.icio.us, social networking goes beyond sharing contacts and connections.
Udell, Jon. InfoWorld (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>Metadata>Social Networking
#33021
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!
Sullivan, Danny. ClickZ (2002). Articles>Web Design>HTML>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
