RE: Proposed text for provenance section

On the metadata provenance question:

-- I stick by my statement that libraries have not traditionally
tracked provenance for *descriptive* metadata since it's seen
as very context-sensitive, subject to change, and not of great
interest for content management over time (the provenance,
that is, not the metadata itself).

-- However there are some newer kinds of metadata for which
the community seems to want to track provenance: namely,
preservation metadata. The new schema from the National
Library of New Zealand makes a big point of capturing and
preserving provenance metadata related to preservation
activities -- i.e. what was done to the digital object over time
in order to preserve it.

-- Someone (maybe Eric?) made the point that in a world
where metadata is coming from god knows where and being
merged together to describe an item it might be nice to know
where that metadata *came from * (i.e. the metadata source,
in the strictest sense of the word provenance). I agree with
that point of view, but question whether it extends to
*subsequent* changes to the metadata once it's in our
environment.

>The reason I used these comments (apart from the fact that MacKenzie is 
>the domain expert here) is that they back up a concern of mine:  I'm 
>getting quite concerned about the complexity this "metadata provenance" 
>issue is bringing.  The libraries domain is relatively closed compared to 
>the Web as a whole.  I just don't think the open Semantic Web scenario of 
>trawling a tonne of triples from lots of sources and sifting through them 
>to see which ones you believe is one we have to deal with on this 
>project.  If a source of complexity can be avoided I think it should be.

Good point. But let's think about the distinctions I'm trying to
make between *types* of metadata (i.e. descriptive vs. long-term
management) and *sources* of metadata vs. tracking every
change over time... different problems, different priorities for
the data curators...

MacKenzie/

Received on Monday, 7 July 2003 21:43:25 UTC