Metadata Issues

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Metadata Issues

• Dr. Paul Miller
• Interoperability Focus
• UKOLN
• P.Miller_at_ukoln.ac.uk http//www.ukoln.ac.uk/

UKOLN is funded by Resource the Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the
Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, as
well as by project funding from JISC and the EU.
UKOLN also receives support from the Universities
of Bath and Hull where staff are based.
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What is Metadata?
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What is Metadata?

• meaningless jargon
• ora fashionable, and terribly misused, term for
  what weve always done
• ora means of turning data into information
• anddata about data
• andthe name of a person (Tony Blair)
• andthe title of a book (The Name of the Rose).

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What is Metadata?

• Metadata exists for almost anything
• People
• Places
• Objects
• Concepts
• Web pages
• Databases.

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What is Metadata?

• Resource Discovery Metadata fulfils three main
  functions
• Description of resource content
• What is it?
• Description of resource form
• How is it constructed?
• Description of resource use
• Can I afford it?.

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Metadata is

• Cataloguing made cool
• But still a bit geeky?
• An important driver for the information economy ?
• A panacea in the battle against information
  overload ?
• Potentially useful as an affordable and
  costeffective means of unlocking a wealth of
  resources ?.

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Metadata in the Wild
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So what has changed?

• the Internet
• Information for All
• (if they have a computer, a phone line, certain
  skills)
• Delivery of resources by resource owners/creators
• Rather than by intermediaries such as librarians
• Customer focus/ accountability
• Open Government, etc.
• A growing belief that I can do anything
• Cataloguing is easy, isnt it?
• A recognition of Good Enough rather than Best
• Fitness for purpose.

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• Mr. Gardiner To ask the Minister for the
  Cabinet Office what work is being undertaken to
  enable citizens and businesses to quickly find
  official information on the internet and
  elsewhere. 160487
• Mr. Ian McCartney This Government are fully
  aware of the need of citizens and businesses
  quickly to find official information on the
  internet, and elsewhere. It should be possible to
  find information without knowing any technical
  terms, and without knowing which Department or
  agency is responsible for it.
• The new e-Government Metadata Framework outlines
  our policy on metadata. It explains how we will
  use an internationally recognised standard, the
  Dublin Core, as the basis for our own system of
  tagging all information resources. This will make
  them easier to find and easier to manage, and
  make life easier for our citizens.
• The Metadata Framework is a natural addition to
  the e-Government Interoperability Framework,
  which I launched on 11 October last year. As with
  the Interoperability Framework, adherence to the
  Metadata Framework is mandated across the public
  sector.

v
House of Commons Hansard written answer for 3 May
2001
10
See www.govtalk.gov.uk/
11
See www.ukonline.gov.uk/
12
See www.ukonline.gov.uk/
13
See ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/
14
See ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/
15
See ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/
16
See www.nationalatlas.gov/
17
See www.nationalatlas.gov/
18
See www.rdn.ac.uk/
19
See www.amazon.co.uk/
20
See www.amazon.co.uk/
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Case Study the Dublin Core
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Introducing the Dublin Core

• An attempt to improve resource discovery on the
  Web
• now adopted more broadly
• Building an interdisciplinary consensus about a
  core element set for resource discovery
• simple and intuitive
• crossdisciplinary not just libraries!!
• international
• open and consensual
• flexible.

See www.dublincore.org/
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Introducing the Dublin Core

• 15 elements of descriptive metadata
• All elements optional
• All elements repeatable
• The whole is extensible
• offers a starting point for semantically richer
  descriptions.

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Introducing the Dublin Core

• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Description
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Date
• Type

• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

www.dublincore.org/
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So what does Dublin Core offer us?

• A set of 15 broad buckets
• Which can easily be mapped to existing data
• Which are sufficiently loose, semantically, that
  they are acceptable to a large number of
  communities
• Which can act as 15 windows into richer
  resources
• Which allow integration at a high level of
  databases, library catalogues, web pages, etc.,
  without needing to catalogue them the same way.

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What is it not?

• (Necessarily) a replacement for any richer
  standard
• Subject Gateways, National Library of Finland
• A detailed set of cataloguing rules
• AACR2
• Just about digital resources.

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Towards a Standard

• Standardising the 15 elements
• CEN Workshop Agreement
• Z39.85 approved by NISO.

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Extending DC (semantic)

• Improve descriptive precision by adding
  substructure (subelements and schemes)
• Greater precision lesser interoperability
• Should dumb down gracefully

Element qualifier
Value qualifier
Affiliation
Contact Info
Based on a slide by Stu Weibel
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Extending DC (modularity)

• Modular extensibility
• Additional elements to support local needs
• Complementary packages of metadata
• but only if we get the building blocks right!

Based on a slide by Stu Weibel
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DC and Interoperability
DCMI Registry
All Domains
Education
Libraries
etc.
GEM
eDNA
SchoolNet
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DC for Education

• Longterm adoption of DC in educational sector
• GEM (USA)
• EdNA (Australia)
• SchoolNet (Europe)
• DC Education working group established 1999.

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Extending DC for Education

• Common extensions
• Audience
• K12, FE, etc.
• Duration
• 23 minutes, 1 module, 1 semester
• Standards
• Quality
• Very good, of course!
• Plus some, used by lt 2 projects, declared out of
  scope.

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Extending DC for Education

• Working principles
• Is there a need?
• Can the need be met with a new value qualifier?
• Can the need be met with a new element qualifier?
• Can the need be solved by adopting an element
  from elsewhere?
• Only if No, add a new element.

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Extending DC for Education

• The Solution
• Add element qualifier to Relation
• conformsTo
• Adopt from IEEE LOM
• Interactivity Type
• Interactivity Level
• Typical Learning Time
• Add new elements
• Audience
• Standard.

See www.dublincore.org/documents/2000/10/05/educa
tion-namespace/
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Metadata Issues
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Metadata Issues

• Doing Metadata is not the solution many believe
  it to be
• There is no one sizefits all miracle cure
• Many problems remain to be satisfactorily
  resolved
• But there is a useful place for metadatabased
  implementations.

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Formats and Flavours

• MARC, DC, EAD, IEEE LOM
• UNIMARC, MARC21, FINMARC
• DC, DCEd, DCLib
• Do Application Profiles offer an answer?
• Is crosswalking feasible?
• Does Dublin Core offer a useful pidgin? .

See www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/
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Tools Guidance

• Tools are needed to ease the process of metadata
  creation
• Guidance is required to ensure a degree of logic
  and consistency.

See www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/
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Cost

• Creating metadata is not cheap
• Create once, use many times
• Archaeology Data Service (ADS)
• Amazons role in ONIX
• Is the cost saving of a DC record sufficient to
  offset the added value of a MARC record? .

See ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/
See www.amazon.co.uk/
See www.editeur.org/onix.html
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Update

• Metadata dates
• How do we keep it current?
• Dont create export
• SINES v. Data Locator
• Harvest
• OAI
• Automated approaches
• Prompt creators, and delete after 6 months? .

See datalocator.askgiraffe.org.uk/
See www.openarchives.org/
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Search

• How do we ensure comparability?
• Searches are rarely comparing like with like
• Dealing with the Google Generation.

See ahds.ac.uk/
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Terminology

• How do we describe resources consistently across
  domains?
• How do we surface these descriptions to those
  without training or a bookshelf full of thesauri?
• Countering the Google effect.

See www.rchme.gov.uk/thesaurus/thes_splash.htm
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Metadata Issues

• and the rest!
• Quality/ Authority
• Managing complexity
• Integration with proper cataloguing
• Relationship to backend systems.

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Conclusion

• Metadata is a reaction to a changing world
• It bears some relation to traditional cataloguing
  activities but is also different
• Each has a place
• There is work still to do! .