Margaret%20Hanley

1
Introduction

• Margaret Hanley
• Business Analyst/Senior Information Architect BBC
• Worked on three continents Australia, USA and
  UK
• Been both a consultant and internal staff to
  companies like Sensis (Yellow Pages in
  Australia), Argus Associates (US), Ingenta (UK
  and BBC (UK)

2
CVs and Metadata

• Exercise
• Definition, types, and uses
• Controlled vocabularies and thesauri
• How to create them

3
Metadata exercise

• Take a paper bag from the back of room
• Each bag will have sheet of paper and a goodie
• Two colours of sheets of papers organise
  yourselves into groups of 5 with the same colour
  sheet

4
Metadatawhat is metadata?

• Data about data
• Information which describes a document, a file or
  a CD
• Common metadata
• CD information title, composer, artist, date
• MS Word document properties time last saved,
  company, author

5
Metadatametadata on the Web

• Used in the header portion of an html document
• Common schemes on the web Dublin Core, RDF and
  TopicMaps
• In databases to describe chunks of information to
  create pages

6
Metadatatypes

• Intrinsic metadata that the file holds about
  itself (e.g., file name or size)
• Descriptive metadata that describes the file
  (e.g., subject, title, or audience)
• Administrative metadata used to manage the file
  (e.g., time last saved, review date, author)

7
Metadatauses

• Search can limit the search to a part of the
  metadata, like title or keyword
• Browse create topical indexes by aggregating
  pages with the same metadata
• Personalization and customization show content
  to an employee based on their role or position in
  the company, e.g. engineer or manager

8
Metadatacontrolled vocabularies

• To do this, the metadata needs to be the same or
  at least be related to each other
• A controlled vocabulary allows a defined set of
  words to be used to describe content, therefore
  allowing the content to be related together

9
Metadatawhat is vocabulary control?

• Controlled Vocabulary
• A list of preferred and variant terms
• A subset of natural language

Preferred Variants Authority
AZ Ariz, Arizona, 85XXX US Postal Service
IBM Intl Bus Machines, Big Blue NY Stock Exchange
Nyctalopia Night blindness Moon blindness National Library of Medicine
10
Metadatawhy control vocabulary? 1/2

• Language is Ambiguous
• Synonyms, homonyms, antonyms, contronyms, etc.
• In the Oxford English Dictionary
• Round takes 7 ½ pages or 15,000 words to
  define.
• Set has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, 10 as
  an adjective.
• The Mother Tongue
• English How It Got That Way
• by Bill Bryson

11
Metadatawhy control vocabulary? 2/2

• so your users dont have to!

12
Metadatasemantic relationships

• Three types
• Equivalence
• Hierarchical
• Associative

13
Metadatalevels of control
14
Metadatawhat is a thesaurus?

• Traditional use
• Dictionary of synonyms (Rogets)
• From one word to many words
• Information retrieval context
• A controlled vocabulary in which equivalence,
  hierarchical, and associative relationships are
  identified for purposes of improved retrieval
• Many words to one concept

15
Metadatathesaurus terminology

• Preferred terms (UF subject headings,
  descriptors)
• SN Scope Notes
• UF Used For
• BT Broader Term
• NT Narrower Term
• RT Related Terms (See Also)
• Variant terms (UF non-preferred, entry terms)
• USE (See)

16
Metadatatypes of thesauri
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Metadatavisibility

• Classic Use
• Both indexers and searchers explicitly map
  natural language terms onto controlled
  vocabularies
• Web Environment
• Able to choose level of visibility (implicit use,
  thesaural browsers)
• Opportunity to educate users (terminology,
  associative learning)

18
Metadataniche applications

• (hypothetical example)

19
Metadatacontrolled vocabulary statistics

• Principle of unlimited aliasing by leveraging
  synonyms, recall went from 20 to 80 (in a small
  collection).
• The Trouble with Computers
• Research study at Bellcore (Furnas et al. 1987)
• The findings indicate that a hypertext index
  with multiple access points for each conceptled
  to greater effectiveness and efficiency of
  retrieval on almost all measures.
• A Usability Assessment of Online Indexing
  Structures
• By Carol A. Hert, Elin K. Jacob, and Patrick
  Dawson
• Journal of the American Society for Information
  Science (September 2000)

20
Metadata Creating CVs

• Understand your content (content audits and
  inventories)
• Understand your business requirements
• Understand what users are looking for
• Decide on the ways the metadata will be used in
  the organisation

21
Metadata defining the fields

• By understanding the content, users and context,
  you should be getting an idea of the ways to
  describe content to make it
• more accessible for users
• able to connect to other content
• meet the business needs
• The fields will reflect this

22
Metadatathe fields

• Say you decided on
• Product name (because the users kept searching
  for it)
• Subject (to links content together)
• Audience (because the business wanted to target
  specific audiences)

23
MetadataUse existing CVs 1/2

• Identify any CVs that exist within the
  organisation
• Identify any CVs that exist outside of the
  organisation that could be useful
• See if any will meet your needs with modification
• It is ALWAYS better to modify a CV than come up
  with it yourself

24
MetadataUse existing CVs 2/2

• License the CVs with the ability to make changes
  ensure that updates to the CV are included
  within the licensing fee
• Add more preferred terms, if the CV is incomplete
  for your collection
• Add more variant terms (your users and
  organisations words)
• Restructure (but only if necessary)

25
MetadataCreating your own

• If no CVs exist, create your own
• Collect terms that could be used in the CV from
  users, content and the business
• Identify CV structure from the terms collected
• Start to create

26
MetadataUsing it in your site

• Static HTML sites
• In the header
• CMS page based systems
• In the header
• CMS object based systems
• With each object
• Databases
• With each record

27
Metadata Power in the site

• Ability to do contextual linking to web sites and
  applications
• Ability to find content
• Syndication
• Personalisation
• Recommendation engines
• Pervasive state for users across applications

28
Thank you

• Questions or comments?
• Margaret Hanley
• mairead_at_yahoo.com