Metadata Mapping Research Articles

An automatic method for the enrichment of DICOM metadata using biomedical ontologies.

This work is a novel contribution for enriching medical images using semantic annotations with a strategy for unifying different ontologies and instances of DICOM medical files. We present the L-MOM library (Library for Mapping of Ontological Metadata) as a tool for making an automatic mapping between instances of DICOM medical files and different medical ontologies (e.g., FMA, RadLex, MeSH). The main contributions are: i) the domain independent L-MOM library which is able to integrate DICOM metadata with ontologies from different domains; ii) a strategy to automatically annotate DICOM data with universally accepted medical ontologies, and provide values of similarity between ontologies and DICOM metadata; and iii) a framework to traverse ontological concepts that characterized clinical studies of patients registered in the framework catalog.

A metadata model and mapping approach for facilitating access to heterogeneous cultural heritage assets

In the last decade, Europe has put a tremendous effort into making cultural, educational and scientific resources publicly available. Based on national or thematic aggregators, initiatives like Europeana nowadays provide a plethora of cultural resources for people worldwide. Although such massive amounts of rich cultural heritage content are available, the potential of its use for educational and scientific purposes still remains largely untapped. Much valuable content is only available in the so-called long tail, i.e. in niche resources such as specifically themed cultural heritage collections, and are difficult to access from the mainstream hubs like major search engines, social networks or online encyclopaedias. The vision of the EEXCESS project is to push high-quality content from the long tail to platforms and devices which are used every day. The realisation of such use cases requires as a basis (and in addition to the functional components) a common metadata representation and tools for mapping between the data sources' specific data models and this common representation. In this paper, we propose a data model for such a system that combines federated search results from different cultural heritage data sources. We then propose an approach for metadata mapping, with a focus on easy configurability of mappings, which--once properly configured--can then be executed on the fly by an automatic service. We demonstrate the approach using a real-world example.

Adaptation of Descriptive Metadata for Managing Educational Resources in the GREDOS Repository

In this paper the authors describe a Project entitled “Divulgación de Recursos Educativos Digitales (DIRED)” (Divulgation of Digital Educational Resources) addressed to promoting specific educational resources and mobile apps for educational proposals in order to manage them through the institutional repository of the Salamanca University (GREDOS). The authors present a proposal for describing learning objects based on pedagogical information, digital competences and learning styles. The authors also suggest educational information for classifying useful mobile apps. To achieve their suitable access and recovery, the authors focus on the use of Learning Object specific metadata in digital repositories such as LOM (Learning Object Metadata). The authors study the metadata mapping necessary to adapt from LOM to Qualified Dublin Core, because this is the standard used in the GREDOS repository built with a DSpace platform. Finally, the authors present their implementation of Learning Object Description in the GREDOS repository.

The Collaborative Study of Archival Metadata Mapping in Taiwan

National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan had been in charge of the National Digital Archiving Project (NDAP) from 2002 to 2012. Over the 10 years, many important institutions had participated in NDAP, including Academia Historica, Taiwan Historica, Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, and the Taiwan Provincial Consultative Council. The digitized collections are from Ming Dynasty, Ch’ing Dynasty, Japanese Occupied Period (1895-1945), and the period of Republican China (1912- present). The total number of digitized items in the project is over 1.4 million. In this study, digitized items with metadata elements designed by Metadata Architecture and Application Team (MAAT) were analyzed and compared to find core elements of each level according to their metadata requirements specifications. The outcomes may serve as reference for future design of metadata elements, and permit contextualized export of archival metadata as the foundation for next generation archival description.

XML Map Metadata Format for Open Map Sources: A Survey and Overview

In the field of Geographic Information Systems, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) are achieving through the open source map database (DB) construction approach. Multiple map DB providers employ open source technologies in attempting to reduce unknown map information in their proprietary maps. In this paper, we survey and overview an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) metadata format for open source maps based on cloud computing and a mash-up between navigation systems and users. New road information is extracted by onboard navigation systems during travel over such roads by drivers or voluntary participants. Metadata recording the road information is generated in an XML map format that is then made available to heterogeneous navigation systems through a cloud computing environment. Specifically, map metadata is provided to various map DB providers through open source network interfaces, after which map DB providers can efficiently relay the updated map information in their proprietary map DB formats.

From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata

This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

EXIF Custom: Automatic image metadata extraction for Scratchpads and Drupal.

Many institutions and individuals use embedded metadata to aid in the management of their image collections. Many deskop image management solutions such as Adobe Bridge and online tools such as Flickr also make use of embedded metadata to describe, categorise and license images. Until now Scratchpads (a data management system and virtual research environment for biodiversity) have not made use of these metadata, and users have had to manually re-enter this information if they have wanted to display it on their Scratchpad site. The Drupal described here allows users to map metadata embedded in their images to the associated field in the Scratchpads image form using one or more customised mappings. The module works seamlessly with the bulk image uploader used on Scratchpads and it is therefore possible to upload hundreds of images easily with automatic metadata (EXIF, XMP and IPTC) extraction and mapping.

Digital preservation of knowledge in the public sector: a pre-ingest tool

This paper describes the need for coordinating pre-ingest activities in digital preservation of archival records. As a result of the wide use of electronic records management systems (ERMS) in agencies, the focus is on several issues relating to the interaction of the agency’s ERMS and public repositories. This paper indicates the importance of using digital recordkeeping metadata to meet more precisely and at the same time semi-automatically the criteria set by memory institutions. The paper provides an overview of one prospective solution and describes the Estonian National Archives’ universal archiving module (UAM). A case study reports the use of the UAM in preserving the digital records of the Estonian Minister for Population and Ethnic Affairs. In this project, the preparation and transfer of archival records was divided into ten phases, starting from the description of the archival creator and ending with controlled transfer. The case study raises questions about how much recordkeeping metadata can be used in archival description and how the interaction of the agency’s ERMS and ingest by the archives could be more automated. The main issues (e.g. classification, metadata elements variations, mapping, and computer files conversions) encountered during that project are discussed. Findings show that the Open Archival Information System functional model’s ingest part should be reconceptualised to take into account preparatory work. Adding detailed metadata about the structure, context and relationships in the right place at the right time could get one step closer to digital codified knowledge archiving by creating synergies with various other digital repositories.

Commercial and cultural sectors: potential for data collaboration?

The main goals of the Linked Heritage Project (sponsored by Europeana) are to provide qualified content to Europeana from the public and private sector. To this aim is created WP4 (Work Group 4) in which the organization EDItEUR takes part. The content are metadata for the cultural heritage. Starting by addressing the issue of the copyright gap, which can involve metadata, the article notes the differences between metadata types developed by the private sector (ONIX for books) and those defined by the public one (FRBR, MARC, MARC21). The aim is to develop integration of both sectors into a shared references core. Exploring the common reference framework requirement, the article emphasizes the new International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) potential, which allows to uniquely identify the subjects involved in the creative field. The future outlook can be further enhanced by involving additional metadata mapping that relates books, people, places, data, other books and other references in a possible linked data form, within which priority should be given in common public identifiers, related semantic mapping layers and shared vocabularies.

Expanding the boundaries of local similarity analysis

BackgroundPairwise comparison of time series data for both local and time-lagged relationships is a computationally challenging problem relevant to many fields of inquiry. The Local Similarity Analysis (LSA) statistic identifies the existence of local and lagged relationships, but determining significance through a p-value has been algorithmically cumbersome due to an intensive permutation test, shuffling rows and columns and repeatedly calculating the statistic. Furthermore, this p-value is calculated with the assumption of normality -- a statistical luxury dissociated from most real world datasets.ResultsTo improve the performance of LSA on big datasets, an asymptotic upper bound on the p-value calculation was derived without the assumption of normality. This change in the bound calculation markedly improved computational speed from O(pm2n) to O(m2n), where p is the number of permutations in a permutation test, m is the number of time series, and n is the length of each time series. The bounding process is implemented as a computationally efficient software package, FASTLSA, written in C and optimized for threading on multi-core computers, improving its practical computation time. We computationally compare our approach to previous implementations of LSA, demonstrate broad applicability by analyzing time series data from public health, microbial ecology, and social media, and visualize resulting networks using the Cytoscape software.ConclusionsThe FASTLSA software package expands the boundaries of LSA allowing analysis on datasets with millions of co-varying time series. Mapping metadata onto force-directed graphs derived from FASTLSA allows investigators to view correlated cliques and explore previously unrecognized network relationships. The software is freely available for download at: http://www.cmde.science.ubc.ca/hallam/fastLSA/.

A programmatic view of metadata, metadata services, and metadata flow in ATLAS

The volume and diversity of metadata in an experiment of the size and scope of ATLAS are considerable. Even the definition of metadata may seem context-dependent: data that are primary for one purpose may be metadata for another. ATLAS metadata services must integrate and federate information from inhomogeneous sources and repositories, map metadata about logical or physics constructs to deployment and production constructs, provide a means to associate metadata at one level of granularity with processing or decision-making at another, offer a coherent and integrated view to physicists, and support both human use and programmatic access. In this paper we consider ATLAS metadata, metadata services, and metadata flow principally from the illustrative perspective of how disparate metadata are made available to executing jobs and, conversely, how metadata generated by such jobs are returned. We describe how metadata are read, how metadata are cached, and how metadata generated by jobs and the tasks of which they are a part are communicated, associated with data products, and preserved. We also discuss the principles that guide decision-making about metadata storage, replication, and access.

Towards seamless integration of digital archives with source systems (Part 1)

The ingest of records and their metadata from electronic records management applications has been a crucial topic for archives in the last decades. Due to the growing amount of records created, new ways need to be found to make the process faster, more efficient and at the same time provide sufficient quality and discoverability for the future users. This paper introduces a solution from the National Archives of Estonia which aims to automate the task of reusing records management metadata for archival purposes. The principles and tools developed rely on an automated metadata mapping solution which allows standardizing different metadata sets used in agencies into the central metadata model applied in the digital repository. The paper presents practical experiences and problems of such a model. These are additionally discussed in Part 2 of the current paper.

Combining Algorithms for Recommendation System on Twitter

Twitter has rapidly increased in popularity over the past few years. So, we have focused on Twitter as it has a large scale of data which is increasingly difficult to search through. In this paper, we propose recommendations for content on Twitter. We explored four dimensions in designing such as: topic relevance of content sources, the content candidate set for users, social voting and Meta data mapping. We implemented 24 algorithms for analysis of 12,000 records for three domains as follows: entertainment, stock exchange and smart phone in the design space. The best performing algorithm improved the percentage of correct matching interesting content to 23.86%.

Finding research trend of convergence technology based on Korean R&D network

Traditionally, collaboration network or citation network is used to answer the old question how scientists or engineers interact with each other. This paper introduces a R&D network to make up the missing aspect of the traditional approaches about using multi-sources and to find out the trend of convergence technology R&D in Korea. We collect data about human resources and national R&D projects from Korean national R&D databases, and then construct a weighted network between experts by using meta-data mapping and the network folding technique. And we apply Newman’s grouping algorithm that is generalized to a weighted network for detecting the community structure of the network. Gathering data from multi-sources is useful to reveal the structure of network rather than to use only one database. Lastly, we perform a network analysis to examine important experts. The result shows significant information about research trend and core experts in Korea. We expect this study will be helpful in three ways: (1) how to make a network from heterogeneous multi-sources, (2) how to figure out the current situation of convergence technology R&D, (3) how to discover who are important people in Korean convergence technology R&D network. And this paper is just a cornerstone of the work to investigate the current situation of national R&D projects in Korea.

Providing universal access to Japanese humanities digital libraries: an approach to federated searching system using automatic metadata mapping

We present our approach for constructing a federated searching system for Japanese humanities digital libraries using automatic metadata mapping. We discuss some achievements in the ongoing research to construct a federated searching system. The goals of this system are (1) to perform metadata mapping automatically for Japanese heterogeneous humanities digital libraries and (2) to let users access multiple humanities digital libraries by using only one query input. The proposed automatic metadata mapping method produced the average mapping precision of 94.9%. We also address the metadata-related challenges facing Japanese humanities databases.

Implementing infrastructures for managing learning objects

AbstractMaking learning objects available is critical to reuse learning resources. Making content transparently available and providing added value to different stakeholders is among the goals of the European Commission's eContentplus programme. This paper analyses standards and protocols relevant for making learning objects accessible in distributed data provider networks. Types of metadata associated with learning objects and methods for metadata generation are discussed. Experiences from European projects highlight problems in implementing infrastructures and mapping metadata types into common application profiles. The use of learning contents and its associated metadata in different scenarios is described and concluded with lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid.

ALV: A New Data Redistribution Approach to RAID-5 Scaling

When a RAID-5 volume is scaled up with added disks, data have to be redistributed from original disks to all disks including the original and the new. Existing online scaling techniques suffer from long redistribution times as well as negative impacts on application performance. By leveraging our insight into a reordering window, this paper presents ALV, a new data redistribution approach to RAID-5 scaling. The reordering window is a result of the natural space hole as data being redistributed, and it grows in size. The data inside the reordering window can migrate in any order without overwriting other in-use data chunks. The ALV approach exploits three novel techniques. First, ALV changes the movement order of data chunks to access multiple successive chunks via a single I/O. Second, ALV updates mapping metadata lazily to minimize the number of metadata writes while ensuring data consistency. Third, ALV uses an on/off logical valve to adaptively adjust the redistribution rate depending on application workload. We implemented ALV in Linux Kernel 2.6.18 and evaluated its performance by replaying three real-system traces: TPC-C, Cello-99, and SPC-Web. The results demonstrated that ALV outperformed the conventional approach consistently by 53.31-73.91 percent in user response time and by 24.07-29.27 percent in redistribution time.

A survey of techniques for achieving metadata interoperability

Achieving uniform access to media objects in heterogeneous media repositories requires dealing with the problem of metadata interoperability. Currently there exist many interoperability techniques, with quite varying potential for resolving the structural and semantic heterogeneities that can exist between metadata stored in distinct repositories. Besides giving a general overview of the field of metadata interoperability, we provide a categorization of existing interoperability techniques, describe their characteristics, and compare their quality by analyzing their potential for resolving various types of heterogeneities. Based on our work, domain experts and technicians get an overview and categorization of existing metadata interoperability techniques and can select the appropriate approach for their specific metadata integration scenarios. Our analysis explicitly shows that metadata mapping is the appropriate technique in integration scenarios where an agreement on a certain metadata standard is not possible.

Automated Database Mediation Using Ontological Metadata Mappings

ObjectiveTo devise an automated approach for integrating federated database information using database ontologies constructed from their extended metadata. BackgroundOne challenge of database federation is that the granularity of representation of equivalent data varies across systems. Dealing effectively with this problem is analogous to dealing with precoordinated vs. postcoordinated concepts in biomedical ontologies. Model DescriptionThe authors describe an approach based on ontological metadata mapping rules defined with elements of a global vocabulary, which allows a query specified at one granularity level to fetch data, where possible, from databases within the federation that use different granularities. This is implemented in OntoMediator, a newly developed production component of our previously described Query Integrator System. OntoMediator's operation is illustrated with a query that accesses three geographically separate, interoperating databases. An example based on SNOMED also illustrates the applicability of high-level rules to support the enforcement of constraints that can prevent inappropriate curator or power-user actions. SummaryA rule-based framework simplifies the design and maintenance of systems where categories of data must be mapped to each other, for the purpose of either cross-database query or for curation of the contents of compositional controlled vocabularies.

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences: a review of the state of the art

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences: a review of the state of the art