Tag: metadata

Crowdsourcing metadata cleaning?

If you're interested in another perspective on dealing with user-generated tags or metadata, this blog post from last.fm, Fingerprinting and Metadata Progress Report talks about how they're trying to create 'order from chaos':

So far our fingerprint server identified 23 million unique tracks, from the 650 million fingerprint requests you’ve thrown at it. Who knows how many unique tracks there are out there.. We have a couple of hundred million tracks based on spelling alone – but not all of them are spelt correctly.

They have some interesting issues to deal with in cleaning up their (i.e. your data, if you're a last.fm user) data, especially when 'the most popular spelling is not necessarily the correct one'. And what about bands that change their name (but are essentially the same band) or line-up (are they still the same band?) – when do you decide to create a new identifier?

They're letting users who are logged in vote on potential corrections to an artist name, effectively testing crowdsourcing metadata corrections as well as the original data creation process. This model could work for museums – depending on the collection, some museums already get a lot of corrections when parts of their collections are published online. What would happen if we made that process transparent?

'The Vision of ORE': the scholarly graph

ORE (a specification for 'Object Reuse and Exchange') is one of those things I always mean to investigate but never quite find time to look into. This post, The Vision of ORE, makes a convincing case for investigating ORE sooner rather than later, as it "tries to map the true nature of contemporary scholarship onto the web" and "attempts to shift the focus from repositories for scholarship to the complex products of scholarship themselves".

This scholarship cannot be contained by web pages or PDFs put into an institutional repository, but rather consists of what the ORE team has termed “aggregates,” or constellations of digital objects that often span many different web servers and repositories. For instance, a contemporary astronomy article might consist of a final published PDF, its metadata (author, title, publication info, etc.), some internal images, and then—here’s the important part—datasets, telescope imagery, charts, several publicly available drafts, and other matter (often held by third parties) that does not end up in the PDF. Similarly, an article in art history might consist of the historian’s text, paintings that were consulted in a museum, low-resolution copies of those paintings that are available online (perhaps a set of photos on Flickr of the referenced paintings), citations to other works, and perhaps an associated slide show.

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By forging semantic links between pieces entailed in a work of scholarship it keeps those links active and dynamic and allows for humans, as well as machines that wish to make connections, to easily find these related objects. It also allows for a much better preservation path for digital scholarship because repositories can use ORE to get the entirety of a work and its associated constellation rather than grabbing just a single published instantiation of the work.

The implementation of ORE is perhaps less commonsensical for those who do not wish to dive into lots of semantic web terms and markup languages, but put simply, the approach the ORE group has taken is to provide a permanent locator (i.e., a URI, like a web address) that links to what they call a “resource map,” which in turn describes an aggregation.
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There has been much talk recently of the social graph, the network of human connections that sites like Facebook bring to light and take advantage of. If widely adopted, ORE could help create the scholarly graph, the networked relations of scholars, publications, and resources.

edna on the benefits of metadata repositories for educational resources

Some random doodling about the possibilities of using the functionalities of an OAI repository as an API lead me to information about metadata repositories, harvesting and edna (Education Network Australia, ' Australia's free online network for educators').

In linked document, Harvesting Overview, they state: "In addition, the edna search API is embedded into numerous other websites – providing access to the edna repository and indexes from external websites. The benefit to you is that, by providing your metadata records for harvesting by edna, you increase exposure to your valuable education and training related resources."

It's a good summary of the processes involved in setting up an OAI repository for harvesting and of the benefits for the organisation; including increased visibility of resources, maximising return on investment [ROI] for created resources and associated metadata and benefiting from services such as RSS that can be delivered back to the organisation.

Linking DSpace and OpenSearch?

Has anyone hooked up Opensearch and a DSpace repository?

We're just about to start using a DSpace repository for collections data – object metadata, media files and metadata and information record (people, places, events, publications) metadata – for selected records from our Mimsy XG collections management system; and I think an OpenSearch service would make the data a lot more findable and possibly a lot more useable.

I really should write it up properly at some stage, but I'm hoping that our repository will have a use beyond providing an OAI-PMH-compliant data source for partnership projects and our own internal requirements.

For example, other people may query the repository to build applications with our data; or use it as a central index of all the records we've published in digital projects over the years, following links to sites in which the object appears. Or it might enable us to try some semantic web-ish things…

I'd be curious to hear about anyone's experience with DSpace/OAI-PMH or OpenSearch for museum collection data, but I'd particularly love to hear from you if you've used them together.