Metadata Application Profile Research Articles

Developing an audiovisual metadata application profile

Digitizing audiovisual materials is gradually being prioritized by libraries and other cultural institutions; however, metadata guidelines and best practices for describing these collections have not been fully developed. This paper outlines the development of local guidelines for audiovisual metadata at the Penn State University Libraries in the context of one digital project, and situates those guidelines within the process of developing an audiovisual metadata application profile for use across institutions.

Developing an audiovisual metadata application profile: A case study

Digitizing audiovisual materials is gradually being prioritized by libraries and other cultural institutions; however, metadata guidelines and best practices for describing these collections have not been fully developed. This paper outlines the development of local guidelines for audiovisual metadata at the Penn State University Libraries in the context of one digital project, and situates those guidelines within the process of developing an audiovisual metadata application profile for use across institutions.

Metadata for digital collections of e‐government resources

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce a process for developing a metadata element set that will describe e‐government resources in digital collections. The outcome of the process is a metadata schema that reuses as many elements as possible from existing specifications and standards (termed as an e‐government metadata application profile). The use of e‐government metadata is to facilitate the electronic categorization and storage of governmental resources, as well as to enhance users' electronic interactions with the public sector.Design/methodology/approachThe paper extends an initial process presented in the context of the European Standardization Committee CEN/ISSS, proposing four steps for developing the application profile: determine the resources to be described by the metadata, identify the stakeholder groups who will use the metadata, determine the use of metadata for each stakeholder group, and specify the metadata elements corresponding to each use.FindingsThe steps of the proposed process are followed in order to develop an e‐government metadata application profile for a particular digital collection: a one‐stop governmental Web portal that enables discovery and access to e‐government services and documents residing at the Web sites of geographically dispersed public authorities.Originality/valueThe combination of existing metadata schemas, in order to create an e‐government application profile, requires a well‐defined process for identifying the context requirements. This paper presents such a process and reports its engagement in a real case study. It may serve as a roadmap for other interested researchers, managers or implementers of digital collections of e‐government resources.

Application Profile Development for Consortial Digital Libraries

In 2002, OhioLINK’s consortia of libraries recognized the need to restructure and standardize the metadata used in the OhioLINK Digital Media Center as a step in the development of a general purpose digital object repository. The authors explore the concept of digital object repositories and mechanisms used to develop complex data structures in a cooperative environment, report the findings and recommendations of the OhioLINK Database Management and Standards Committee (DMSC) Metadata Task Force, and identify lessons learned, addressing data structures as well as data content standards. A significant result of the work was the creation of the OhioLINK Digital Media Center (DMC) Metadata Application Profile and the implementation of a core set of metadata elements and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set mappings for use in OhioLINK digital projects. The profile and core set of metatadata elements are described.

From metadata application profiles to semantic profiling: ontology refinement and profiling to strengthen inference-based queries on the semantic web

Ontologies on the Semantic Web form a basis for representing human-conceivable knowledge in a machine-understandable manner. Ontology development for a specific knowledge domain is, however, a difficult task, because the representation produced has to be adequately detailed and broad enough at the same time. The CIDOC-CRM is such an ontology, pertaining to cultural heritage, which we align to the Semantic Web environment: first, transforming it to OWL and then profiling it not in the usual flat metadata sense, but by refining and extending its conceptual structures, taking advantage of OWL semantics. This kind of profiling maintains applicability of the model, while enabling more expressive reasoning tasks. To this end, we construct a mechanism for acquiring implied and web-distributed information that is used to conduct and present a series of experimental inferences on the CRM-profiled form.

Desarrollo de un esquema de metadatos para la descripción de recursos educativos: el perfil de aplicación MIMETA

As a result of the ongoing work of the DOTEINE and IACORIE research projects, whose main goal is to develop document organization and retrieval tools that can be applied to educational settings, an application profile is defined. Such profile is designed to be used to describe the educational resources gathered in a repository project conceived to support learning in various educational levels. To do so, the main concepts related to educational metadata are reviewed, and the most significant schemes–standards, specifications and application profiles used in different educational digital libraries– are analysed. After that, the adopted metadata application profile is presented, as well as the main conclusions reached, among which we find the present predominance of the LOM and Dublin Core standards and the identification of five semantic categories that represent essential characteristics in the educational domain.

The Development and Use of Metadata Application Profiles

ABSTRACT A metadata application profile identifies the metadata elements used in a particular domain or application and describes how they have been customized for that use. A metadata application profile facilitates information exchange and element re-use. In practice, the development and use of metadata application profiles present a number of challenges. This paper investigates these issues by examining the definition and function of a metadata application profile, interoperability challenges, and the evolution of thinking about metadata elements, element sets, and application profiles. The authors draw on their experience in the Government of Canada to discuss these issues and suggest rections.

Describing online learning content to facilitate resource discovery and sharing:the development of the RU LOM Core

Abstract The development of Internet technologies has the ability to provide a new era of easily accessible and personalised learning, facilitated through the flexible deployment of small, reusable pieces of digital learning content over networks. Higher education institutions can share and reuse digital learning resources in order to improve their educational offerings. Descriptive language (known as metadata) is required to facilitate the search and retrieval of learning content. Various research offerings have been proposed to promote interoperable educational metadata. However, current metadata standards cannot accommodate the requirements of every community of users. This paper describes the development of an educational metadata application profile for describing learning resources within a South African higher education context.

Dublin core and museum information: metadata as cultural heritage data

In 2000, the museum community reported on the use of Dublin Core metadata in the museum context and proposed a broader set of elements for museums. Since then, Dublin Core metadata has evolved and it is now possible to use rich descriptions (data) and Semantic Web technologies and maintain the interoperability of Dublin Core metadata. This paper reviews the museum experience in the light of developments in the DCMES. It is based on recent experience with a virtual museum of Indigenous culture using Metadata Application Profiles (MAPs) and schema cross-walks.

Developing a learning object metadata application profile based on LOM suitable for the Australian higher education context

<span>This paper reports recent work in developing of structures and processes that support university teachers and instructional designers incorporating learning objects into higher education focused learning designs. The aim of the project is to develop a framework to guide the design and implementation of high quality learning experiences. This framework is premised on the proposition that learning objects are resources that can be incorporated within a learning design. The learning design serves as the pedagogical model that drives the development. The first phase of the project required an analysis of metadata schemas by which learning objects could be described, to facilitate discovery, retrieval and inclusion in a learning design. In particular, the pedagogical descriptors within the IEEE Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard were examined to determine their suitability for use in this project. The findings indicated that enhancement of the educational descriptors was required. To address this, a learning object metadata application profile specific to Australian higher education has been developed. This paper describes the process by which the metadata application profile was developed within the context of the overall project.</span>

Enhancing the semantic interoperability of multimedia through a core ontology

A core ontology is one of the key building blocks necessary to enable the scalable assimilation of information from diverse multimedia sources. A complete and extensible ontology that expresses the basic concepts that are common across a variety of domains and media types and that can provide the basis for specialization into domain-specific concepts and vocabularies, is essential for well-defined mappings between domain-specific knowledge representations (i.e., metadata vocabularies) and the subsequent building of a variety of services such as cross-domain searching, tracking, browsing, data mining and knowledge acquisition. As more and more communities develop metadata application profiles which combine terms from multiple vocabularies (e.g., Dublin Core, MPEG-7, MPEG-21, CIDOC/CRM, FGDC, IMS), a core ontology will provide a common understanding of the basic entities and relationships, which is essential for semantic interoperability and the development of additional services based on deductive inferencing. In this paper, we first propose such a core ontology (the ABC model) which was developed in response to a need to integrate information from multiple genres of multimedia content within digital libraries and archives. Although the MPEG-21 RDD was influenced by the ABC model and is based on a model extremely similar to ABC, we believe that it is important to define a separate and domain-independent top-level extensible ontology for scenarios in which either MPEG-21 is irrelevant or to enable the attachment of ontologies from communities external to MPEG, for example, the museum domain (CIDOC/CRM) or the biomedical domain (ON9.3). We evaluate the ABC model's ability to mediate and integrate between multimedia metadata vocabularies by illustrating how it can provide the foundation to facilitate semantic interoperability between MPEG-7, MPEG-21 and other domain-specific metadata vocabularies. By expressing the semantics of both MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 metadata terms in RDF Schema/DAML+OIL [and eventually the Web Ontology Language (OWL)] and attaching the MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 class and property hierarchies to the appropriate top-level classes and properties of the ABC model, we have defined a single distributed machine-understandable ontology. The resulting ontology provides semantic knowledge which is nonexistent within declarative XML schemas or XML-encoded metadata descriptions. Finally, in order to illustrate how such an ontology will contribute to the interoperability of data and services across the entire multimedia content delivery chain, we describe a number of valuable services which have been developed or could potentially be developed using the resulting merged ontologies.

CanCore: Metadata for Learning Objects

The vision of reusable digital learning resources or objects, made accessible through coordinated repository architectures and metadata technologies, has gained considerable attention within distance education and training communities. However, the pivotal role of metadata in this vision raises important and longstanding issues about classification, description and meaning. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of this vision, focusing specifically on issues of semantics. It will describe the CanCore Learning Object Metadata Application Profile as an important first step in addressing these issues in the context of the discovery, reuse and management of learning resources or objects.