Embracing lossy: Sacrificing metadata to gain agility

Abstract

AbstractEditor's SummaryBorrowed from data encoding and compression, the concept of lossiness captures our ability to extract meaning despite a reduced set of data. Metadata are lossy representations of complete data and may be the solution to information overload, enabling agile response to urgent information needs. But library professionals and data curators, eager to preserve original data, tend to favor their own customized descriptions of content and may be reluctant to compromise by using the minimalist Dublin Core metadata vocabulary. By favoring unique descriptions and resisting adoption of common bibliographic metadata, they lose access to valuable open access data sources. A better approach is to enable access through shared metadata, embracing lossy and making vast stores of rich information resources available. InfoSynth, a prototype system, helps small digital libraries adapt their custom metadata, represent metadata including Dublin Core elements as RDF/XML triples and return trimmed down and normalized metadata‐based descriptions in triple format. The use of a standard format facilitates sharing with other sources for enhanced information access.