1. Metadata: What, How and Why? IMT595B April 6, 2007 Mike Crandall University of Washington Information School mikecran@u.washington.edu

2. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?2 Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us http://youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

3. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?3 Roadmap What is metadata? –The basics –Metadata standards How can you use metadata? –What is it for? –When do you use it? –How much does it cost? –What about maintenance? Why would you use metadata? –What value does it add? –When are alternatives a better choice? –Social tagging vs. metadata Things to think about

4. What is Metadata?

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6. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?6 What is Metadata? Data about data Definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment… metadata may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data (FOLDOC) Levels of complexity –Simple (embedded in object; e.g., a hyperlink) –Structured (Dublin Core, content management) –Rich (library MARC records, Encoded Archival Description)

7. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?7 Origins Library science –Focus is on entities as containers for information –Emphasis is on resource discovery –Tight focus resulted in widespread standards Data management –Focus is on the information itself –Much more complex information spaces (e.g., NASA satellite data) –Much more varied types of information and use –Emphasis is on data use (authenticity, authority) –Standards tend to be associated with data types

8. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?8 Types of Metadata Administrative –Object management –Rights and access management –Maintenance and preservation –Meta-metadata for managing metadata Structural or technical –Describes relationships between parts –Enables recognition and use of objects by systems Descriptive –Describes characteristics of object –Physical and aboutness (subject)

9. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?9 Metadata Schemas Sets of metadata elements designed to meet the needs of a community The elements are the fields that hold values authorized for use in the schema Many different needs, so many different schemas are available Three primary components –Structure: the model used to derive the schema (e.g., RDF) –Semantics: the meaning of the elements Values are specified through rules or vocabularies (“encoding schemes” or authority control) –Syntax: the method for encoding the schema (e.g., XML, XHTML)

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11. How Can You Use Metadata?

12. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?12 Information Systems Soergel, 1985

13. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?13 Objectives of Metadata Find –Through search engines, catalogs, etc. Identify –Distinguishing between items for purposes of use Select –By attributes such as language, format, genre, etc. Obtain –Either directly or through location/ordering metadata Navigate –For example, categories on web sites Manage –Content management systems –Document repositories

14. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?14 Finding

15. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?15 MSWeb Search

16. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?16 News Publishing Tool

17. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?17 Navigating

18. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?18 Facets at wine.com Facet / Metadata# of vocabulary terms Type46 Region16 Winery750 Price6 Rating6 Total terms824 Total combinations1,656,824 Morante, Marcia. Creating Useful Taxonomies: Metadata, Taxonomies and Controlled Vocabularies. SLA – PER Division, June 8, 2004. http://www.kcurve.com/Metadata_Taxonomy%20Development_SLA_060804.ppthttp://www.kcurve.com/Metadata_Taxonomy%20Development_SLA_060804.ppt

19. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?19 Managing http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/

20. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?20 Costs of Metadata Basic question should really be what are you trying to accomplish, and does metadata add value to your project? Startup costs can be high, but maintenance costs will be at least equal if not more Good metadata systems require resources– people, machines, and time Don’t start without an understanding of what those might be

21. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?21 Example Startup Costs

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23. Why Use Metadata?

24. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?24 It’s Not Just the Tools "Content" has been treated like a kind of soup that "content providers" scoop out of pots and dump wholesale into information systems. But it does not work that way. Good information retrieval design requires just as much expertise about information and systems of information organization as it does about the technical aspects of systems. Bates,Marcia J. “After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time” First Monday 7(7), July 2002. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.htmlhttp://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.html

25. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?25 The Big Picture Selamat & Choudrie, 2004 We’re here But don’t forget the rest

26. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?26 Alternative Approaches What about folksonomies and social tagging? –What problems can they solve? –What issues do they raise? How many people are likely to tag? What about synonym control? Does it matter? Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity. Arnold Toynbee, historian(1889-1975)

27. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?27 Alternative Approaches

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32. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?32 Where Does Metadata Fit? We tend to think that the hard problems are the big ones. So we believe that searching the Web is hard because it's so huge. But I've been thinking lately that the really hard problems are actually the ones in the middle. In the middle, many algorithms don't work that well with moderate document sets, context becomes more important, interaction is critical, and you can't get the user "in the ballpark" anymore--you have to get them right to the thing they're looking for. Karl Fast- http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/private/aifia-members/2004-February/001129.htmlhttp://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/private/aifia-members/2004-February/001129.html

33. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?33 Braly & Froh (2007) after Shirky (2005) A Continuum When to Use Formal Metadata

34. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?34 Things to Think About Make sure you can measure results Don’t assume one size fits all Choose user access points wisely Provide user tools and education for effective use of your metadata Make sure you’re adding value Balance theory with practical needs Consider trust and provenance

35. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?35 Readings Soergel, D. (1985). Organizing information. Principles of data base and retrieval systems. Orlando, Fl: Academic Press. 450 p. Taylor, A. (2004). The Organization of Information. 2nd ed. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited. 417p. Burnett, K. (1999) “A Comparison of the Two Traditions of Metadata Development”. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(13), 1209-1217. Rosenfeld, L. & P. Morville. (2002). Chapter 9, “Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata” in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. (p. 176-208). Zeng, M.L. (2005). Construction of controlled vocabularies: A primer. NISO. http://www.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/Z3919/index.htm. http://www.slis.kent.edu/~mzeng/Z3919/index.htm Bates,Marcia J. (2002) “After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time” First Monday 7(7), July 2002. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.htmlhttp://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_7/bates/index.html Bryar, J.V. (2001) “Taxonomies: The value of organized business knowledge”. A White Paper Prepared for NewsEdge. Byrne, T. (2004) “Enterprise information architecture: Don’t do ECM without it”. Econtent 27.5 (May 2004): 22-29. Earley, S. (2005). “Developing enterprise taxonomies”. Early & Associates. http://www.earley.com/Earley_Report/ER_Taxonomy.htm. http://www.earley.com/Earley_Report/ER_Taxonomy.htm Montague Institute. (2001). “Managing taxonomies strategically”. http://www.montague.com/abstracts/taxonomy3.html.http://www.montague.com/abstracts/taxonomy3.html Selamat, M.H. & J. Choudrie. (2004). “The diffusion of tacit knowledge and its implications on information systems: The role of meta-abilities”. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(2), 128-139. Bulterman, D.C.A. (2004) "Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?," IEEE MultiMedia, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 10-17, 2004. http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dcab/PDF/ieeeMM2004.pdf http://homepages.cwi.nl/~dcab/PDF/ieeeMM2004.pdf Fitzgerald, M. (2006) “The Name Game: Tagging tools let users describe the world in their own terms as taxonomies become "folksonomies."” CIO Magazine, April 1, 2006. http://www.cio.com/archive/040106/et_main.html?action=printhttp://www.cio.com/archive/040106/et_main.html?action=print Braly, M. & G. Froh (2007). “Tagging”. Presentation for IMT530 Organization of Information Resources. (Feb 10.2007). EnterpriseTagging.org http://enterprisetagging.org/assets/pdf/IMT530_Tagging_Presentation.pdf.http://enterprisetagging.org/assets/pdf/IMT530_Tagging_Presentation.pdf Shirky, C. (2005). “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”. Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

36. April 6. 2007Metadata: What, How and Why?36 Questions???