Metadata and Search

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

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

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill: Part 1

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.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Metadata

Metadata is Essential Web Writing Skill: Part 2

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?

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2003). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Metadata

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

Metadata: Seven Tips for Writing Better Keywords

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.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Search Engine Optimization

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

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

Metadata Glossary

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

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

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.

United Kingdom (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

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

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

Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs

Which would be easier to remember: one thousand individual terms or three facets of ten terms each?

Tzitzikas, Yannis, Nicolas Spyratos, Panos Constantopoulos and Anastasia Analyti. ERCIM News (2002). Articles>Web Design>Indexing>Metadata

Faceted Browsing

Discover what "faceted browsing" is and other Web-focused terms for old ideas.

Instone, Keith. Instone.org (2004). Presentations>Web Design>Metadata

Putting Facets on the Web: An Annotated Bibliography

This is a classified, annotated bibliography about how to design faceted classification systems and make them usable on the World Wide Web.

Denton, William. Miskatonic (2003). Articles>Bibliographies>Metadata

Use of Faceted Classification

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

What are the Differences Between a Vocabulary, a Taxonomy, a Thesaurus, an Ontology, and a Meta-Model?

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

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

Faceted Access: A Review of the Literature

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.

Maple, Amanda. Indiana University (1995). Articles>Web Design>Metadata

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

Give Your Website a Location

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.

Oxer, Jonathan. Internet Vision Technologies (2008). Articles>Web Design>Metadata>Geography

Using RDF for Knowledge Management

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.

Sperberg, Roger and Rajeev Voleti. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Knowledge Management>XML>Metadata

Semantic Thumbnails - Summarizing XML Documents and Collections

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.

Dalkilic, Mehmet and Arijit Sengupta. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Content Management>Metadata>Semantic

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