Relationship between content and metadata

This paper

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april02/weibel/04weibel.html

Has an interesting taxonomy on the relationship between metadata and
content:

"C. Association Models
There are various ways to associate metadata with resources:

Embedded metadata resides within the markup of the resource. This implies
that the metadata is created at the time that the resource is created, often
by the author. Experts differ concerning whether author-created metadata is
best or whether it is better to have trained practitioners evaluate and
describe resources. As a practical matter, resource description expertise is
a scarce and costly commodity, and thus any investment by authors in the
description of their intellectual products is likely to be of value.
Embedded metadata can also be harvested, and the presumptive increase in
visibility that might result is an incentive for creators to assign
metadata. Early studies of the efficacy of such metadata are only recently
becoming available [GRE-01].

Associated metadata is maintained in files tightly coupled to the resources
they describe. Such metadata may or may not be harvestable. The advantage of
associated metadata derives from the relative ease of managing the metadata
without altering the content of the resource itself, but this benefit is
purchased at the cost of simplicity, necessitating the co-management of
resource files and metadata files.

Third-Party metadata is maintained in a separate repository by an
organization that may or may not have direct control over or access to the
content of the resource. Typically such metadata is maintained in a database
that is not accessible to harvesters, though the emerging Open Archives
Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol proposes a system that encourages
the disclosure of metadata repositories among federated OAI servers
[OAI-02]."

perhaps we want to introduce the distinction between embedded, associated
and third-party metadata in the document?

Dr Mark H. Butler
Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
mark-h_butler@hp.com
Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 06:03:12 UTC