Meta Data Services

About: Meta Data Services is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2564 publications have been published within this topic receiving 40102 citations.

Metadata, infrastructure, and computer-mediated communication in historical perspective

Abstract: In this paper we describe the creation and use of metadata on the early Arpanet as part of normal network function. By using the Arpanet Host-Host Protocol and its sockets as an entry point for studying the generation of metadata, we show that the development and function of key Arpanet infrastructure can be studied by examining the creation and stabilization of metadata. More specifically, we use the Host-Host Protocol's sockets as an example of something that, at the level of the network, functions as both network infrastructure and metadata simultaneously. By presenting the function of sockets in tandem with an overview of the Host-Host Protocol, we argue for the further integrated study of infrastructure and metadata. Finally, we reintroduce the concept of infradata to refer specifically to data that locate data throughout an infrastructure and are required by the infrastructure to function, separating them from established and stabilized standards. We argue for the future application of infradata as a concept for the study of histories and political economies of networks, bridging the largely library and information science LIS study of metadata with the largely science and technology studies STS domain of infrastructure.

Reusable enterprise metadata with pattern-based structural expressions

Abstract: An essential part of modern enterprise software development is metadata. Mainstream metadata formats, including XML deployment descriptors and Java 5 annotations, suffer from a number of limitations that complicate the development and maintenance of enterprise applications. Their key problem is that they make it impossible to reuse metadata specifications not only across different applications but even across smaller program constructs such as classes or methods.To provide better enterprise metadata, we present pattern-based structural expressions (PBSE), a novel metadata representation that offers conciseness and maintainability advantages and is reusable. To apply PBSE to enterprise applications, we translate PBSE specifications to Java annotations, with annotating classes automatically as an intermediate build step. We demonstrate the advantages of the new metadata format by assessing its conciseness and reusability, as compared to XML and annotations, in the task of expressing metadata of J2EE reference applications and a mid-size, commercial, enterprise application.

Metadata to Support Transformations and Data & Metadata Lineage in a Warehousing Environment

Abstract: Data warehousing is a collection of concepts and tools which aim at providing and maintaining a set of integrated data (the data warehouse – DW ) for business decision support within an organization. They extract data from different operational data sources, and after some cleansing and transformation procedures data are integrated and loaded into a central repository to enable analysis and mining. Data and metadata lineage are important processes for data analysis. The first allows users to trace warehouse data items back to the original source item from which they were derived and the latter shows which operations have been performed to achieve that target data. This work proposes integrating metadata captured during transformation processes using the CWM metadata standard in order to enable data and metadata lineage. Additionally it presents a tool specially developed for performing this task.

MIT's CWSpace project: packaging metadata for archiving educational content in DSpace

Abstract: This paper describes work in progress on the research project CWSpace, sponsored by the MIT and Microsoft Research iCampus program, to investigate the metadata standards and protocols required to archive the course materials found in MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) into MIT's institutional repository DSpace. The project goal is “to harvest and digitally archive OCW learning objects, and make them available to learning management systems by using Web Services interfaces on top of DSpace.” The larger vision is one of complex digital objects (CDOs) successfully interoperating amongst MIT's various learning management systems and learning object repositories, providing archival preservation and persistent identifiers for educational materials, as well as providing the means to richer shared discovery and dissemination mechanisms for those materials. The paper describes work to date on the analysis of the content packaging metadata standards METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) and especially IMS-CP (IMS Global Learning Consortium, Content Packaging), and issues faced in the development and use of profiles, extensions, and external schema for these standards. Also addressed are the anticipated issues in the preparation of transformations from one standard to another, noting the importance of well-defined profiles to making that feasible. The paper also briefly touches on the DSpace development work that will be undertaken to provide new import and export functionalities, as the technical specifications for these will largely be determined by the packaging metadata profiles that are developed. Note that the degree of interoperability considered herein might be referred to as “first level,” as this paper addresses the packaging metadata only, which in turn is the carrier or envelope for the descriptive (and other kinds of) metadata. It will no doubt be an even more challenging task to ensure interoperability at what might be referred to as the “second level,” that of semantic metadata.

Towards Cleaning-Up Open Data Portals: A Metadata Reconciliation Approach

Abstract: This paper presents an approach for metadata reconciliation, curation and linking for Open Governamental Data Portals (ODPs). ODPs have been lately the standard solution for governments willing to put their public data available for the society. Portal managers use several types of metadata to organize the datasets, one of the most important ones being the tags. However, the tagging process is subject to many problems, such as synonyms, ambiguity or incoherence, among others. As our empiric analysis of ODPs shows, these issues are currently prevalent in most ODPs and effectively hinders the reuse of Open Data. In order to address these problems, we develop and implement an approach for tag reconciliation in Open Data Portals, encompassing local actions related to individual portals, and global actions for adding a semantic metadata layer above individual portals. The local part aims to enhance the quality of tags in a single portal, and the global part is meant to interlink ODPs by establishing relations between tags.