# Presentation: 365401

## Making Metadata More Accessible,Making Metadata More Expressive

- Carl Lagozelagoze@cs.cornell.eduDLI2 PIs Meeting, Roanoke, 2001

**Harmony**

## The world according to Arms:
Metadata is expensive, we don't need it
We've spent too much on metadata (and metadata meetings)
The world according to Lesk:
I dislike funding metadata projects, because they always recommend that every other project should be more expensive

*Metadata is expensive, we don't need it*
*We've spent too much on metadata* *(and metadata meetings*)
- The world according to Lesk:
*I dislike funding metadata projects, because they always recommend that every other project should be more expensive*

## Projects

- Project Prism (DLI2)
- http://www.prism.cornell.edu
- Harmony (DSTC/JISC/NSF)
- http://metadata.net/harmony
- Participants
- Dan Brickley (ILRT)
- Jane Hunter (DSTC)
- Carl Lagoze (Cornell)
- Libby Miller (ILRT)

**Harmony**

## Some Goals/Hypotheses

- Is common simple metadata useful? How does it relate to more complex metadata? How to model metadata for more complex purposes?
- How to people want to use metadata?
- Research discovery
- Content management, etc. (e.g., preservation, authentication, provenance)
- What is the nature of the metadata that people are creating?

## Understanding and Evaluating Metadata based on Query Capabilities

- Simple boolean queries on tags?
- Agent, time, place questions?
*Who was responsible for what and when*
*Preservation, provenance, trust, rights management*

## Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

- Simplicity vs. Complexity
- C. Lagoze, “Keeping Dublin Core Simple: Cross Domain Discovery or Resource Description?,” *D-Lib Magazine*, 7 (1), 2001.
- Can "semantic interoperability" be achieved through such imprecise "standards"
- Tags provide a useful context for automatic indexing?
- Evidence is not good (CIMI experiments)

## Open Archives Initiative

- http://www.openarchives.org
- KISS as a research topic?
- Technical specification facilitates research goals
- Simple protocol for exposing lots of metadata
- Mandated metadata format (DC) allows us to study:
- How people use/abuse "simple" metadata
- How people dumb-down complex semantics ("graceful degradation")
- Extensibility facilities allow us to study:
- How people use metadata for unique community needs
- How metadata is useful for creating variant services

## Resource-centric Metadata

| Title | Anna Karenina |
| --- | --- |
| Author | Leo Tolstoy |
| Illustrator | Orest Vereisky |
| Translator | Margaret Wettlin |
| Date Created | 1877 |
| Date Translated | 1978 |
| Description | Adultery & Depression |

| Birthplace | Moscow |
| --- | --- |
| Birthdate | 1828 |

## ABC/Harmony Event-aware metadata model

- Goals: better understanding about what we are trying to do with metadata, guidance
- Recognizing inherent lifecycle aspects of description (esp. of digital content)
- Modeling incorporates time (events and situations) as first-class objects
- Supplies clear attachment points for agents, roles, occurrent properties
- Resource description as a “story-telling” activity
- http://metadata.net/harmony/ABCV2.htm

## Museum Collaboration

- CIMI Collaboration
- AMOL (Australia Museums and Galleries Online)
- Natural History Museum of London
- National History Museum of Denmark
- Library of Congress/RLG
- Records collected at: http://archive.dstc.edu.au/CIMI/
- CIDOC collaboration
- DELOS workshop on ontology harmonization

## ABC Model

- Entity/relationship and RDF foundation
- A world of typed and identified entities,
- that are interrelated in multiple, rich ways
- Core ontology (agents, events, states, actions)
- Time and transformation as first-class concepts
- Duality of Objects - properties (*adjectives*) that are "constant" and time-dependent (*stateful*) – occurrents vs. continuants
- Agents and their actions (*verbs*) occur in *events* that modify the state of objects
- http://metadata.net/harmony/ABCV2.htm

## Slide 12

## Queries over RDF Graphs

*List details of events where Lagoze is a participating agent*
- SELECT ?title, ?type, ?time, ?place, ?name
- FROM
-    http://ilrt.org/discovery/harmony/oai.rdf
- WHERE
-    (web::type ?event abc::Event)
-    (abc::context ?event ?context)
-            .....
- AND ?name ~ lagoze
- USING web FOR http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#

- Rudolf Squish – http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rdfquery
- AMOL Demo – http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2001/03/demos/image.html

## Metadata for complex multimedia objects

- Semi-automated generation of  SMIL mark-up of distance learning objects (video, slides, transcripts)
- Developed metadata model and web search interface to enable searches across
- Institutions (Cornell and DSTC);
- Collections within an institution;
- Within individual presentations.
**	**http://sunspot.dstc.edu.au:8888/smil/search.html
-  Paper at ECDL

## DSTC Pty Ltd

## Etc.

- Bibliographic community – events and new cataloging models
- C. Lagoze, “Business Unusual; How "event awareness" may breathe life into the catalog,” presented at Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control in the New Millennium, Library of Congress, Washington DC, 2000.