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Does metadata matter?
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Transcript of Does metadata matter?
July 2008
Andy Powell, Eduserv [email protected]
www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation
Does metadata matter?
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or…
should we be interested in metadata and, if so, why?
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I’m going to try to deliver 130 slides in 30 minutes
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then you can ask questions
(yes… I really did say “130 slides”)
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non-technical
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metadata jargon
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first, some history…
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metadata is…
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machine-readable
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descriptive
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for the purposes of…
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resource discovery
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resource management
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delivery / access control
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use / re-use
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long term preservation
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MARC - Machine-Readable Catalogue
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still the predominant
metadata standard
(in thelibrary world)
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a distributed search standard called…
Z39.50
so that multiple library catalogues can be searched from one place
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AACR2 currently being replaced by…
RDA
(more generic – i.e. not just books!)
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Z39.50 supplemented by SRW and SRU
(Web-friendly variants)
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FRBR
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none of which needs bother you…
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other than to note that…
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metadata tends to get more complicated the longer you think about it
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1994
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a few 10s of 1000s of pages
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but recognised that finding stuff was going to start getting difficult
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people (mainly librarians) began trying to catalogue it by hand
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http://www.intute.ac.uk/http://www.intute.ac.uk/
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meanwhile…
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AltaVista
(first major Web search engine – circa 1995)
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people began to realise that the metadata they embedded into Web pages might be important
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hang on…
did I just say “metadata embedded into Web pages”?
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<html><head><title>A web page</title></head><body>…</body></html>
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<html><head><title>A web page</title><meta name=“keywords” content=“some, key, words” /><meta name=“description” content=“a summary” /></head><body>…
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birth of the SEO industry
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then came Google
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and the rest, as they say, is history
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Google takes note of links between pages
Google PageRank
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but places less emphasis on embedded metadata
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metaspam
<meta name=“keywords” content=“coca cola” />
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metacrap
<title>put your title here</title>
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despite that, work continued on embedded metadata
most notably in the form of…
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Dublin Core
(circa 1995)
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initially 15 metadata elements
a.k.a properties
a.k.a. attribute/value pairs
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contributorcoveragecreator
datedescription
formatidentifierlanguagepublisherrelationrightssourcesubject
titletype
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embedded into Web pages
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or encoded using XML
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intention was to improve indexing by search engines
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but people forgot about…
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“metaspam” and “metacrap”
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the search engines didn’t!
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and so, by and large,
search engines still ignore embedded metadata
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despite that, there has been fairly widespread adoption in policy terms
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particularly in e-Government(e.g. UK eGMS)
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but also in other areas – education, health, environmental agencies, libraries, cultural
heritage sector, …
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growth of rules around metadata content(i.e. cataloguing rules)
(everyone’s rules are different)
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and growth in use of additional elements for particular communities
(and everyone’s additions are different)
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such usage documented in the form of “application profiles”
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Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
coordinating “standards” body
(note again: growing complexity over time)
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meanwhile…
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the W3C developed the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
(circa 1999)
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the standard for the “Semantic Web”
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Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for a machine-readable Web of data
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allowing software to navigate and reason about Web content automatically
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a Web of “Linked Data”
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RDF, RDFS, OWL, FOAF, …
(but also Microformats, RSS, …)
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meanwhile…
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elearning community was busy developing its own standards
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IEEE LOM(Learning Object Metadata)
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same as DC
…but different!
(different elements, different syntax)
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<cough />
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a brief aside
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identifiers are important
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URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is the identifier system of the Web
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but some issues…
e.g. around persistence
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to cut a long story short
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it turns out that ‘http’ URIs (a.k.a. URLs) are the worst kind of Web identifier…
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…apart from all the others
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(not everyone agrees with that!)
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<breath />
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repositories
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but arXiv was not the only repository
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recognised need for aggregating metadata from different repositories into a single place so that
it could be searched
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OAI-PMH
(a protocol for metadata harvesting)
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harvesting metadata into repository search engines
of which OAIster is best known
(but it isn’t really used much)
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and the major search engines like Google don’t support the OAI-PMH
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because it isn’t mainstream enough
(and because of “metaspam” and “metacrap”)
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and so to 2008…
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political agenda around institutional repositories
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in order to store, manage and disclose…
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institutional assets
research paperslearning objectsresearch data
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exposing metadata about these things using the OAI-PMH to search services
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which services?
err… OAIster :-(
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what kind of metadata?
typically DC
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or a variant of DC
because simple DC is really too simple to be very useful
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but unfortunately…
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…DC variants tend to be more complex
and therefore metadata can’t be created very easily by ordinary researchers
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but that’s another story!
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ok…
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why are we interested?
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are we interested?
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metadata is everywhere
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metadata in sites like the Science Museum is mostly locked away within the site
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can expect growing pressure to expose it on the Web for others to “mash up”
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in HE, we are operating in an “institutional repository” political environment
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we (should?) have an interest in repositories of research publications and research data
particularly research data
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metadata comes to the fore in scenarios where content is non-textual (e.g. data) and where required information can’t easily be derived
from textual content (e.g. author name)
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thank you
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OK I lied…
…it was 128 slides
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unless you count these last two